despoiling the place of its
finest trees. This is the tree referred to in these lines, written in
1862, in the album of Lydia Amanda Ayer (now Mrs. Evans), his
schoolmate Lydia's niece:--

"A dweller where my infant eyes
Looked out on Nature's sweet surprise,
Whose home is in the ample shade
Of the old Elm Tree where I played,
Asks for her book a word of mine:--
I give it in a single line:
Be true to Nature and to Heaven's design!"

Whittier took us that October day to neighbor Ayer's house, where the
brother of little Lydia was still living, who also was a schoolmate of
the poet, and they talked of the old times with the greatest relish.
The Ayer house occupies the site of a garrison house, built of strong
oaken timbers, and used as a house of refuge in the time of the Indian
wars. The Whittiers, though close at hand, never availed themselves of
its protection, even when Indian faces covered with war-paint peered
through the kitchen windows upon the peaceful Quaker family. We were
soon joined by another aged schoolmate, Aaron Chase, and with him we
went to Corliss Hill, where Whittier showed us the two houses in which
he first went to school. They are both now standing, and are
dwelling-houses in each of which a room was given up for the district
school--one before the house described in "In School Days" was built,
and the other while it was being repaired. He had not yet arrived at
school age when his sister Mary took him to his first school, kept by
his life-long friend, Joshua Coffin, to whom he addressed the poem, "To
My Old Schoolmaster." As I happened to be a nephew of Coffin, he told
me stories of his first school. It was kept in an unfinished ell of a
farmhouse; but the room had been transformed into a neatly furnished
kitchen when we visited it. In the poem referred to he alludes to the
quarrels of the good man and his tipsy wife heard through "the cracked
and crazy wall." He told this story of the tipsy wife: She sent her son
for brush to heat her oven. He brought such a nice load that she
thought it too bad to waste it in the oven. So she sent her son with it
to the grocery, and he brought back the liquor he received in payment.
But this made her short of oven wood, and to eke out her supply of fuel
she burned a loose board of the cellar stairs. The next time she had
occasion to go to the cellar, she forgot the hiatus she had made and
broke her leg. After Mr. Chase left us, Wh