Though young Whittier was a wide-awake boy and eager to learn, there was only the district school, held for a few weeks each winter, for him to attend. Yet an opportunity was not lacking for bringing to light his poetic gift. One of his schoolmasters, who lived for part of the term in the Whittier home, used to read to the family from various interesting books, and one night chose for their entertainment a volume of Burns's poems. As the lines of the much-loved Scotch poet fell from the reader's lips, the young boy listened as he had never before listened in his life. His own power awakened and responded warmly to that of the older poet. From that hour, whether he was at home or at school, he found great pleasure in writing verses, which he often showed to his young friends. Thus it was that his older sister Mary was able, all unknown to him, to send off one of his poems to the Newburyport _Free Press_. When the paper containing the verses came, the young poet read the lines over and over again, almost too dazed to recognize them as his own. This contribution was followed by another made to the same paper. By this time the editor's interest had been so much aroused that, learning from the postman of the author's whereabouts, he traveled to Haverhill to visit him. This editor was no other than William Lloyd Garrison, who later became famous as a leader of the cause of abolition. He urged strongly that the boy's education be continued. Perhaps his words would have counted for nothing, however, had it not been that somewhat later the editor of the Haverhill _Gazette_, in which some of young Whittier's verses had been published, entreated the boy's parents to send him to the new Haverhill Academy. His father's consent having been gained, Greenleaf learned from a man who worked on the farm how to make slippers, and thus he became able to pay his own expenses during a term at the Academy. By teaching school in the winter, and by helping to keep the books of a Haverhill merchant, he was able to provide for a second term. Thus was completed his regular schooling. In the meanwhile his friend Garrison had kept an eye on him, and at the close of 1825 secured for him the editorship of _The American Manufacturer_, a weekly magazine published in Boston. Young Whittier entered with great interest into the work, contributing articles on politics and temperance as well as numerous poems. Though he received only nine dollars a week, he was able, when called back to Haverhill in 1829, by his father's illness, to give about one half of what he had earned to help remove the mortgage on the farm.