the gray gulls wheel
Over a floor of burnished steel."

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ROCKY HILL CHURCH]

Rev. J. C. Fletcher, in an article published in 1879, says that he was
with Whittier at Salisbury Beach, in the summer of 1861, when he saw
the remarkable mirage commemorated in these lines in "The Tent on the
Beach:"--

"Sometimes, in calms of closing day,
They watched the spectral mirage play;
Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh,
And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky."

[Illustration: MOUTH OF HAMPTON RIVER

Scene of "The Wreck of Rivermouth"]

Mr. Fletcher was spending several weeks that summer with his family in
a tent on the beach. He says: "Here we were visited by friends from
Newburyport and Amesbury. None were more welcome than Whittier and his
sister, and two nieces, one of whom, Lizzie, as we called her, had the
beautiful eyes--the grand features in both the poet and his sister.
Those eyes of his sister Elizabeth are most touchingly alluded to by
Whittier when he refers to his sister's childhood in the old Snow-bound
homestead:--

"'Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed in the unfading green
And holy peace of Paradise.'

"One day, late in the afternoon, I recall how Elizabeth was enjoying a
cup of tea in the family tent, while Whittier and myself were seated
upon a hillock of sand outside. It had been a peculiarly beautiful day,
and as the sun began to decline, the calm sea was lit up with a dreamy
grandeur wherein there seemed a mingling of rose-tint and color of
pearls. All at once we noticed that the far-off Isles of Shoals, of
which in clear days only the lighthouse could be seen, were lifted into
the air, and the vessels out at sea were seen floating in the heavens.
Whittier told me that he never before witnessed such a sight. We called
to the friends in the tent to come and enjoy the scene with us.
Elizabeth Whittier was then seeing from the shore the very island,
reduplicated in the sky, where two years afterwards she met that fatal
accident which, after months of suffering, terminated her existence."

[Illustration: SALISBURY BEACH, BEFORE THE COTTAGES WERE BUILT

Scene of "The Tent on the Beach"]

Elizabeth fell upon the rocks at Appledore in August, 1863. It was not
thought at the time that she was seriously injured, and perhaps Mr.
Fletcher is wrong in attributing her death solely to this cause. For
many year