Corn-Makers 215 



gregational faith, but the most noted of all colonial physicians 

 and a leader in American agriculture. 



Graduated in the fifth class at Yale College, young Eliot 

 was hardly out of the classroom before his neighbors in the 

 town of Killingworth, near New Haven, called him to be their 

 minister. His career is living proof that a man can be a prophet 

 in his own home town. Jared Eliot never had another parish, 

 nor Killing worth another minister for more than fifty years. 

 During that half-century he was also Connecticut's country 

 doctor, who rode from Hartford to New London, from Fair- 

 field to Putnam; with pills and powders in one saddle-bag, 

 and in the other seeds, roots and plants which he gathered as 

 he rode, to plant in his own garden, whenever he got home. 

 People had faith in Jared Eliot's religion and in his prescrip- 

 tions, too. Perhaps that is what made them curative. That 

 the doctor himself was by way of being a psychiatrist is re- 

 vealed by the powders he gave to a chronic invalid of hypo- 

 chondriac temper, which he made himself, sitting in his saddle 

 before turning in at her gate, out of the grit from a broken 

 clay pipe, sugar and starch. 



How pleasant to think of that summer afternoon on which 

 the doctor saw a horseman ride up Killingworth's street 

 headed toward Boston. The doctor fully expected to see the 

 rider pass, as most of them did; and as this rider certainly 

 intended to do. It was not his will, but the horse's, which 

 brought him up the lane by the doctor's house and right up 

 to the doctor's stable door. 



The man who sat the horse was a short, plump man, with 

 a broad, bland face. This, as he looked at his horse and where 

 that horse had brought him, wore an air of bewilderment. 

 He swept off his hat and bowed in apology to Dr. Eliot. Lift- 

 ing the reins he tried to wheel the horse away from the stable 

 door. 



"On my word, sir, I do not know why the beast should 

 have brought me here into your stable yard." 



"But I do." Jared Eliot laid a hand on the horse's bridle. 



