When Agassiz requested to go down the ages with no other name than
"Teacher," he not only appropriately crowned his own life-work, but
stamped the vocation of teaching with a royalty which can never be
gainsaid. By this act he dignified with lasting honor all those to whom
the name "Teacher," in its truest meaning, can be applied.

In this work of teaching, one man stands out in the history of New
England who should be better known to the present generation. He was a
benefactor in the colonial days when education was striving to keep her
lamp burning in the midst of the necessary practical work which engaged
the attention of most of the people of that time. His name was Ezekiel
Cheever. When a young man of twenty-three years, he came from
London--where he was born January 25, 1614--to Boston, seven years after
its settlement. The following spring he went to New Haven, where he soon
married, and became actively engaged in founding the colony there. Among
the men who went there the same year was a Mr. Wigglesworth, whose son,
in later years, as the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, gave an account of
Mr. Cheever's success in the work of teaching, which he began soon after
reaching the place. "I was sent to school to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, who at
that time taught school in his own house, and under him in a year or two
I profited so much through y'e blessing of God, that I began to make
Latin & to get forward apace."

Mr. Cheever received as a salary for two or three years twenty pounds;
and in 1643, while receiving this salary, his name is sixth in the list
of planters and their estates, his estate being valued only at twenty
pounds. In the year following, his salary was raised to thirty pounds
a year. This probably was an actual necessity, for his family now