consisted, besides himself and wife, of a son Samuel, five years old,
and a daughter Mary of four years. Ezekiel, born two years before, had
died. This son, Samuel, it may be said in passing, was graduated at
Harvard College in 1659, and was settled as a clergyman at Marblehead,
Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty-five, having been
universally esteemed during his long life.

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
Athenæum. 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