The years are now rapidly fleeting, and _Cockenoe_ is advancing in years with the settlements. The power of the Montauks is a thing of the past; they exercise no control over the rest of the Long Island Indians, who convey land without the assent of the Montauk Sachem. As most of the younger generation of the natives can speak English, probably as well as he, there is no necessity for him to interpret. He is now about the last of his generation still exercising the right as a member of the house of the Sachems, in the councils of the clan; and, on August 3, 1687,[81] he unites once more with the members of his tribe in the Montauk conveyance to the inhabitants of East Hampton: "For all our tract of land at Mantauket, bounded by part of the Fort Pond, and Fort Pond Bay west; the English land south by a line from the Fort Pond to the Great Pond ... to the utmost extent of the Island from sea to sea," etc., and then he retires from our view forever on the records of the past. At the time of making this deed, half a century had elapsed since the conflict on the hills of Mystic--fifty eventful years in the history of our Colonies. If he was twenty-five years of age when he parted from Eliot in 1646 or 1647, he had then reached threescore years and five; not by any means an aged man, but, for all we know, he may have lived for some years afterward.[82] There may be other recorded facts relating to his life which I have overlooked, or they may lie buried in the time-stained archives of other Long Island and New England towns--inaccessible, undecipherable, and unpublished--which some future historian may unfold and bring to light.[83] The seeds of knowledge planted by Eliot on the fertile field of this native's mind bore good fruit, even if his preceptor did write at an early day he knew not what use he then made of it. For the part he took in the rise and development of our settlements--a life work, unparalleled by that of any other Long Island or New England Indian--he deserves to be enrolled upon the page of honor. And now, amid the rolling hills of Montauk, which he loved so well, and within sound of the everlasting murmur of the mighty ocean, which he so often heard, in a grave unmarked and unknown,[84] he sleeps to await the resurrection morn. A scarred and battered fragment from nature's world--a glacial bowlder, typical of the past--should be his monument[85]--on one side a sculptured entablature, inscribed: "_To the Memory of a Captive in the Pequot War, the first Indian Teacher of John Eliot; A firm friend of the English Colonists; Cockenoe-de-Long Island._" THE END. FOOTNOTES: