-great-grandson. It is to this
day called by Amesbury people Whitcher Hill--as that appears to have
been the pronunciation of the name in the olden time. For some reason
he removed across the river to Newbury. As a town official of
Salisbury, he had occasion to lay out a highway towards Haverhill--a
road still in use. He came upon a location that pleased his fancy, and
in 1647, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned to the northern side
of the river and built a log house on the left bank of Country Brook,
about a mile from the location he selected in 1688 for his permanent
residence. He lived forty-one years in this log house, and here raised
a family of ten children, five of them stalwart boys, each over six
feet in height. He was sixty-eight years old when he undertook to build
the house now the shrine visited yearly by thousands. In raising its
massive oaken frame he needed little help outside his own family. As to
the location of the log house, the writer of these pages visited the
spot with Mr. Whittier in search of it in 1882. He said that when a boy
he used to see traces of its foundation, and hoped to find them again;
but more than half a century had passed in the mean time, and our
search was unsuccessful. It was on the ridge to the left of the road,
quite near the old Country Bridge.

[Illustration: THE HAUNTED BRIDGE OF COUNTRY BROOK]

Country Bridge had the reputation of being haunted, when Whittier was a
boy, and several of his early uncollected poems refer to this fact. No
one who could avoid it ventured over it after dark. He told me that
once he determined to swallow his fears and brave the danger. He
approached whistling to keep his courage up, but a panic seized him,
and he turned and ran home without daring to look behind. It was in
this vicinity that Thomas Whittier built his first house in Haverhill.
Further down the stream was Millvale, where were three mills, one a
gristmill. This mill and the evil reputation of the bridge are both
referred to in these lines from "The Home-Coming of the Bride," a
fragment first printed in "Life and Letters:"--

"They passed the dam and the gray gristmill,
Whose walls with the jar of grinding shook,
And crossed, for the moment awed and still,
The haunted bridge of the Country Brook."

It was the custom of the pioneers, when they had the choice, to select
the sites of their homes near the small water powers of the brooks; the
large rivers t