The spring of 1891 came and Lowell had cheerful hope of further work. He had not dismissed literature because he had collected his writings into a series of books. He meant to write more, to bring together more scattered papers for a volume and to make at least one more collection of his poems. Meanwhile he read--his books were close at hand and his constant friends. He re-read Boswell’s Johnson for the fourth time, and he read the recently published full diary of Walter Scott. He took up novel reading, rather a new taste, and amused himself with contemporaneous society in England as depicted by Norris. At Mr. Bartlett’s suggestion, the whist club to which he had been so faithful held one more meeting which he made out to attend. But though he could go out but little, he had a pleasant glimpse of the world that lay about his house,--the earliest and the best known world to him. He had had a flat dish with stones in it conveniently placed in his garden, and connected it with his water pipe so that his little friends the thrushes, the orioles, and squirrels might have free use of the modern improvements to which he was indifferent enough.[109] Outside of his bedroom window a pair of gray squirrels had nested, and as he was imprisoned there by the illness which now closed in about him, he looked with kindly interest on their gambols in the treetops. His is friends came as he could see them, and he entertained them with humorous diatribes on his gaoler gout. Now and then he could pencil a letter or note, sending a message perhaps to some equally bound sufferer, as when he commiserated his old friend Judge Hoar, shut up with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, and whimsically cautioned him against mistaking it for the gout which he himself was enduring. A faint smile plays about these last expressions of his kindly nature, as he seems to wave the world aside that he may take his friends by the hand. Death found him cheerful, and he passed away in the middle of the bright summer. APPENDIX A. THE LOWELL ANCESTRY I. _Paternal._[110] 1. The first American ancestor of the Massachusetts Lowells was PERCEVAL LOWELL, written also LOWLE, who came from Somersetshire, England, in 1639, when he was 68 years old, and was one of the early settlers of Newbury, Mass., which was organized in 1642. He wrote a poem on the death of Governor Winthrop, and died in Newbury, 8 January, [1664/5]. 2. Perceval Lowell brought with him to America two sons, JOHN and RICHARD, and a daughter JOAN. John, the elder brother, was made a Freeman in 1641; he was a deputy from Newbury to the General Court in 1643-1644. He died in Newbury in 1647, aged 52 years.