and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him. A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy companions:-- “Where Felton puns in English or in Greek, And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak, The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew, The author dwelt beyond my boyish view. There once, the college butler aided, too, My pony through his own front door he drew, I on her back, and strove with winning airs To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs; Rejected hospitality! the more He tugged in front, she backed toward the door. Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast. Across the way, where once an Indian stood O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood, On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails In droughty times, replenished then with pails, Richard the Second from their moorings cast His shingle fleets, and served before the mast, While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store Of choicest pebbles for the other shore. Then walked at leisure to the antipodes, Changing _en route_ to Chinese consignees.” Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells, to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr. Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus. He engaged in publishing under the firm name of Wells & Lilly, but meeting with reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors. The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully as he remembers how much he owes you.”