The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country within easy stroll of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my age.”[12] Thirty years after these experiences he could give this graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village choir:-- “Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim, In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn, Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace Went down a slope of short ones at a race, While who could sing and who could not, but would, Rushed helter-skelter after as they could. Well I remember how their faces shone, Safe through some snare like _Re-sig-na-ti-on_, And how some graceless youth would mock the tones Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones: In towns ambitious of more cultured strains, The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe, Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow; Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set, Blew devious discord through his clarinet, And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek In secular tunes its living all the week, Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”[13] More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small geographical earnings of the schoolroom. The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment beginning-- “Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”