How the tears spring to the eyes in reading this immortal little poem! The bee-hives ranged in the garden, the sun "tangling his wings of fire in the trees," the dog whining low, the old man "with his cane to his chin,"--we all know the scene: its every feature appeals to our sympathies and associations. * * * * * "The Double-headed Snake of Newbury" is a whimsical story, in which the poet waxes right merry as he relates how-- "Far and wide the tale was told, Like a snowball growing while it rolled. The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry; And it served, in the worthy minister's eye, To paint the primitive serpent by. Cotton Mather came galloping down All the way to Newbury town, With his eyes agog and his ears set wide, And his marvellous inkhorn at his side; Stirring the while in the shallow pool Of his brains for the lore he learned at school, To garnish the story, with here a streak Of Latin, and there another of Greek: And the tales he heard and the notes he took, Behold! are they not in his Wonder-Book?" A word about Whittier's "Prophecy of Samuel Sewall." It seems that old Judge Sewall made the prophecies of the Bible his favorite study. One of his ideas was that America was to be the site of the New Jerusalem. Toward the end of his book entitled "Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica; ... or ... a Description of the New Heaven as it makes to those who stand upon the New Earth" (1697), he gives utterance to the triumphant prophecy that forms the subject of Whittier's poem. His language is so quaint that the reader will like to see the passage in Sewall's own words:--