A hollow square was formed around a low platform, and near by was a table with a Bible upon it. Gentians, one of Whittier's favorite flowers, and goldenrod formed the only floral ornaments. Back of the seats stood a dense crowd that must have numbered thousands, almost filling the garden. Children climbed the trees and looked with open-eyed wonder on the scene. On an apple bough, his naked legs dangling in the air almost over the head of Edmund Clarence Stedman, was an urchin who might have inspired the "Barefoot Boy;" faces peered from many a tree, from the vine-clad arbor and from the window of a neighboring barn, down upon the crowd. The poet's relatives, and members of the Society of Friends from various places, occupied the seats forming the hollow square, an easy-chair being reserved for Oliver Wendell Holmes, but he was unable to be present. The Friends gave the exercises their peculiar complexion; first one and then another rising to eulogize their friend as the "Spirit moved them." Verses of Whittier were recited by "that lovely Quaker lady," Mrs. Gertrude Cartland, and by Mrs. James H. Chace. Mr. E. C. Stedman was the last speaker. He spoke of the personal loss he felt in the poet's death. "To know him was a consecration, to have his sympathy a benediction. His passing away was not so much a death as a translation. He is gone, and has not left his mantle! How could he? Why should he? No one can overestimate his artless art, his power, vigor and effect in his polemic efforts. No one put so much heart or so much religion into his writings. He was one of the great trio of New England poets, of whom there is only one now left. They are the vanishers of whom he spoke. He was a believer in the inward life, as a poet should be. He will be his own successor, and belongs to our time as well as to that earlier time to which he is linked by his work. We may say of him that the chariot swung low and he was translated, dividing the waters of truth, beauty, and religion, with his mantle. The last time I spoke at a memorial service was at Bayard Taylor's funeral. Taylor was Whittier's friend, and like Whittier he had a firm belief in immortality." It is to Mr. Stedman that Whittier dedicated in a few choice lines his latest volume of verse, "At Sundown," which the poet, as if prescient of his coming death, had had privately printed and circulated among a few friends a year before his fatal illness. The most picturesque and striking figure at Whittier's funeral was that of the venerable John W. Hutchinson, whose long gray hair fell over a broad white Rembrandt collar. He and his sister, Abby Hutchinson Patton, were life-long friends of Whittier, and their voices in the song they sang--"Close his eyes, his work is done"--were, "like the echoes of sweet bells from the far-away time of their youth, when they and Whittier were one in endeavor."