ting her beloved uncle's grave on the anniversary of his birth),
caused to be furnished with a massive black walnut set formerly used in
the "spare-room" of her uncle's house--the room where Lucy Larcom, Gail
Hamilton, the Cary sisters, and George Macdonald were in former times
entertained. A stipulation of this gift was that the particular room in
the Home thus to be furnished was to be known as the Whittier room.

In connection with this Home and this room comes the story of romantic
interest. Two years after the death of Mr. Whittier an old lady made
application for admission to the Home on the ground that in her youth
she was a schoolmate and friend of the poet. And although she was not
entitled to admission by being a resident of the town, she would no
doubt have been received if she had not died soon after making the
application.

This aged woman was Mrs. Evelina Bray Downey, concerning whose
schoolgirl friendship for Whittier many inaccurate newspaper articles
were current at the time of her death, in the spring of 1895. The story
as here told is, however, authentic.

Evelina Bray was born at Marblehead, October 10, 1810. She was the
youngest of ten children of a ship master, who made many voyages to the
East Indies and to European ports. In a letter written in 1884, Mrs
Downey said of herself: "My father, an East India sea captain, made
frequent and long voyages. For safekeeping and improvement he sent me to
Haverhill, bearing a letter of introduction from Captain William Story
to the family of Judge Bartley. They passed me over to Mr. Jonathan K.
Smith, and Mrs. Smith gave me as a roommate her only daughter, Mary.
This was the opening season of the New Haverhill Academy, a sort of
rival to the Bradford Academy. Subsequently I graduated from the Ipswich
Female Seminary, in the old Mary Lyon days."

Mary Smith, Miss Bray's roommate at Haverhill, and her lifelong
friend--though for fifty years they were lost to each other--was
afterward the wife of Reverend Doctor S. F. Smith, the author of
"America."

Evelina is described as a tall and strikingly beautiful brunette, with
remarkable richness of colouring, and she took high rank in scholarship.
The house on Water Street at which she boarded was directly opposite
that of Abijah W. Thayer, editor of the _Haverhill Gazette_, with whom
Whittier boarded while at the academy. Whittier was then nineteen years
old, and Evelina was seventeen. Naturally, they walked to