ager listener, and
_Bonnie Doon_, _Highland Mary_, and _Auld Lang Syne_ were trilled
forth as the master himself may have sung them among the Scottish
"banks and braes." Never before had the farmer boy heard of the famous
peasant, and a new door was opened through which he passed into an
undreamed of world. A few months later the school-master gave him
a copy of Burns's poems, and with this gift the boy became a poet
himself. For these songs of roadsides and meadows, of ploughed fields
and wet hedgerows, were to him familiar pictures of every-day life,
whose poetry, once revealed, had to express itself in words.

The boy was the son of John and Abigail Whittier, Quaker farmers
owning a little homestead in the valley of the Merrimac, near the town
of Haverhill, Mass. In honor of an ancestor he had been named John
Greenleaf Whittier, the Greenleaf, as he tells us in one of his poems,
having become Americanized from the French _feuille verte_, _green
leaf_, a suggestion, perhaps, of far away days in which the family
might have been men of the wood, keepers of the deer or forest
guarders in France during feudal ages. In his boyhood, life in the
Merrimac valley was primitive enough. The house was small and plain,
the kitchen being the living room, and the parlor dedicated to Sunday
and holiday use only. The floor was sanded and on the wide fire-place
benches the men and children of the family sat at night to whittle
axe-handles, mend shoes, crack nuts, or learn the next day's lessons.
Often a stranger was found among them; some Quaker travelling on
business, or a stranger on his way to some distant town, or perhaps
a professional beggar to whom the hospitality of the place was well
known. Once when the mother had refused a night's shelter to an
unprepossessing vagabond, John was sent out to bring him back. He
proved to be an Italian artisan, and after supper he told them of the
Italian grape gatherings and festivals, and of the wonderful beauty
of Italy, paying for his entertainment by presenting to the mother a
recipe for making bread from chestnuts.

Sometimes the visitor would be an uncanny old crone who still believed
in witches and fairies, and who told how her butter refused to come,
or how her candle had been snuffed out by a witch in the form of a
big black bug. One old woman in the neighborhood was renowned for
her tales of ghosts, devils, fairies, brownies, sprenties, enchanted
towers, headless men, haunted mills