Of books to read they had not many in the Whittier household, and most of them were the works of saintly Quakers. The Bible was the chief book, and that they read until they had it by heart. Joshua Coffin used to bring various books which he had and read them aloud to the older people, not paying much attention to the boy of fifteen who sat in the corner and listened. Once he brought a volume of Burns’s poems and read page after page, explaining the Scotch dialect. Greenleaf, then a tall, shy lad, listened spellbound. He had got into what his Uncle Moses called his “stood.” The teacher saw that he was interested, and offered to leave the book with him. That was about the first good poetry he had ever heard. It kindled the fire of poetic genius in his own mind and heart, and he soon began to write poetry himself. But he was only a farmer’s lad, and writing poetry does not come easy to one in such surroundings. While he was in his teens he made his first visit to Boston, staying with a relative who was post-master of the city. You may imagine how he looked, a gawky country boy, with broad-brimmed Quaker hat and plain, homespun clothes. But he wore for the first time in his life “boughten buttons” on his coat, and his Quaker hat had been covered by his Aunt Mercy with drab velvet. These made him feel very fine. He was induced to buy a copy of Shakespeare; and at the table of his relative was a brilliant lady, who was very kind to him. He had been warned against the temptations of the town, and you can imagine how shocked he was to find out that this fine lady was an actress. She invited him to go to the theater; but he hastily declined, and was almost ashamed of himself for having bought a volume of plays, even if they were Shakespeare’s. Somehow or other a copy of one of the Waverley novels came into the Quaker home, and Whittier and his sister read it together without letting their parents know. They read late into the night; and at one time, just as they were getting to an exciting part, the candle burned out and they had to go to bed in the dark, for it was quite impossible to get another. There is a story that Whittier’s first verses were written on the beam of his mother’s loom. At any rate he wrote verses on his slate in school, and passed them around among the scholars. One stanza his sister remembered, and repeated afterward: And must I always swing the flail, And help to fill the milking-pail? I wish to go away to school; I do not wish to be a fool. The desk on which the poet wrote his first verses was built by that original Thomas Whittier, more than a hundred years before Greenleaf was born. It stood in the kitchen for many years; then it was packed away. But a few years before Whittier died, a niece of his had it taken out and repaired, and he used it until the end of his life.