The finest Puritan of them all comes last, Governor John Winthrop of the Bay Colony. A splendid, noble face is his. He is every inch a gentleman. He has brought the best of old England into the crude life of New England and is helping to build up so sturdy a race that the generations which follow will be proud of their descent from him and Puritans like him. He does not agree with Roger Williams, but a life-long friendship springs up between the two. “Mr. John Winthrop,” said the younger man, “tenderly loved me to his last breath.” Many of the quaint, old-fashioned letters addressed to the Bay governor have come down to us. “I sometimes fear,” says the writer, “that my lines are as thick and over-busy as the mosquitoes.” He discusses religious questions, talks over Indian troubles and asks Winthrop’s advice, because, says he, “of the frequent experience of your loving ear, ready and open toward me.” These, then, were a few of Roger Williams’ neighbors. There were still other neighbors, who were friends as well. These were the New England Indians. From the very beginning of his new life in America, Roger Williams had taken a deep interest in them. For one thing, he held that as they were the first-comers, the land belonged to them and could not be rightly owned by others, except by purchase. It is true that most of the colonists did pay for the territory they occupied whatever the natives thought it was worth, yet as soon as Roger Williams gave his opinion on the subject, he was accused of disloyalty. It was one thing to bargain with the savages, quite another to announce boldly that James, who granted the first New England charter, was not “sovereign lord” of the whole continent, and that those who claimed land merely by royal grant had no title to it whatever. In spite of opposition, Roger Williams had the courage of his convictions. He wrote a treatise on the subject which he sent to the governor and council of Plymouth. No portion of Roger Williams’ life is more interesting than that which deals with the red men. The Wampanoags or Pokanokets, whose chief was Massasoit, occupied the Plymouth territory, while to the west were the powerful Narragansetts, whose sachems were Canonicus and Miantonomo. To gain the friendship of the Indians, Roger Williams endured all kinds of hard and unpleasant experiences, for his “soul’s desire was to do the natives good.” He visited them, he encouraged their visiting him, he patiently studied their language. To quote his own words: “God was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes (even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem) to gain their tongue.”