In 1836 Whittier became secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and he was all his life interested in public affairs, and wrote much for newspapers and periodicals. In 1838 he began to edit the “Pennsylvania Freeman” in Philadelphia, but in the following year his press was destroyed and his office burned by a pro-slavery mob, and he returned to New England, devoting the larger part of his life, aside from his anti-slavery political writings, to embalming its history and legends in his literature, and so completely has it been done by him it has been declared: “If every other record of the early history and life of New England were lost the story could be constructed again from the pages of Whittier. Traits, habits, facts, traditions, incidents――he holds a torch to the dark places and illumines them every one.” Mr. Whittier, perhaps, is the most peculiarly American poet of any that our country has produced. The woods and waterfowl of Bryant belong as much to one land as another; and all the rest of our singers――Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and their brethren――with the single exception of Joaquin Miller, might as well have been born in the land of Shakespeare, Milton and Byron as their own. But Whittier is entirely a poet of his own soil. All through his verse we see the elements that created it, and it is interesting to trace his simple life, throughout, in his verses from the time, when like that urchin with whom he asserts brotherhood, and who has won all affections, he ate his * * * “milk and bread, Pewter spoon and bowl of wood, On the door-stone gray and rude. O’er me, like a regal tent, Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent, Purple curtains fringed with gold Looped in many a wind-swung fold;” and, when a little older his fancy dwelt upon the adventures of Chalkley――as “Following my plough by Merrimac’s green shore His simple record I have pondered o’er With deep and quiet joy.” In these reveries, “The Barefoot Boy” and others, thousands of his countrymen have lived over their lives again. Every thing he wrote, to the New Englander has a sweet, warm familiar life about it. To them his writings are familiar photographs, but they are also treasury houses of facts over which the future antiquarian will pour and gather all the close details of the phase of civilization that they give. The old Whittier homestead at Amesbury is now in charge of Mrs. Pickard, a ♦niece of the poet. She has recently made certain changes in the house; but this has been done so wisely and cautiously that if the place some day becomes a shrine――as it doubtless will――the restoration of the old estate will be a simple matter. The library is left quite undisturbed, just as it was when Whittier died. ♦ ‘neice’ replaced with ‘niece’ * * * * * MY PLAYMATE.