It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College, and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might now be reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself to the difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and still scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences. In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of barbarism should be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them adopted the English dress. Their simple government was administered by tithing-men, or "rulers of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the book of Exodus. Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods of Concord and Grafton. By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians," as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in Eliot's villages, as many more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket, and 700 in the Plymouth colony. There seems to be no doubt that these Indians were really benefited both materially and morally by the change in their life. In theology it is not likely that they reached any higher view than that expressed by the Connecticut sachem Wequash who "seeing and beholding the mighty power of God in the English forces, how they fell upon the Pequots, ... from that time was convinced and persuaded that our God was a most dreadful God;" accordingly, says the author of "New England's First Fruits," "he became thoroughly reformed according to his light." Matters of outward observance, too, the Indians could understand; for we read of one of them rebuking an Englishman "for profaning the Lord's Day by felling of a tree." The Indian's notions of religion were probably confined within this narrow compass; the notions of some people that call themselves civilized perhaps do not extend much further. [Sidenote: Villages of Christian Indians]