Besides being the teacher of the new colony, Mr. Cheever entered into other parts of its work. He was one of the twelve men chosen as "fitt for the foundacon worke of the church." He was also chosen a member of the Court for the plantation, at its first session, and in 1646 he was one of the deputies to the General Court. It is supposed that during this time he wrote his valuable little book called The Accidence. It passed through seventeen editions before the Revolution. A copy of the eighteenth edition, printed in Boston in 1785, is now in the Boston Athenaeum. It is a quaint little book of seventy-two pages, with one cover gone, and is surely an object of interest to all loving students of Latin. A copy of the tenth edition is found in Harvard College, while it has been said that a copy of the seventh is in a private library in Hartford, Connecticut. The last edition was published in Boston in 1838. In a prospectus, containing commendations of the work from many eminent men of learning, the Honorable Josiah Quincy, LL.D., president of Harvard College, said of it: "A work which was used for more than a century in the schools of New England, as the first elementary book for learners of the Latin language; which held its place in some of the most eminent of those schools, nearly, if not quite, to the end of the last century; which has passed through at least twenty editions in this country; which was the subject of the successive labor and improvement of a man who spent seventy years in the business of instruction, and whose fame is second to that of no schoolmaster New England has ever produced, requires no additional testimony to its worth or its merits." A copy of this edition is now in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dr. David W. Cheever, of Boston, a descendant of the schoolmaster, also has one in his possession.