August may bring vivid heat and wilting humidity if it will. The witches’ twilight had brought down the Merrimac from the far north the flavor of autumn which is later to follow in full force, nor will it wholly leave us again. The ghostliest thing about Country Brook was a sound which seemed to come up it from the cool depths of the woods into which it flows, a soft breathing sigh, now regular, now intermittent, as if a spirit of the woodland slept peacefully for a little, then gasped with troubled dreams. Seeking to discover this ghost I found a little way along the road from the bridge a broad grassy avenue that led with a certain majesty in its sweep as if to some woodland castle whose people were so light-footed that they wore no paths in their broad green avenue. Yet after all it led me only to a wide meadow where the sighing I had heard was that of the grass going to sleep under the magic passes of a mower’s scythe. No clatter of mowing machine was here, just the swish of a scythe such as the meadow has heard yearly since the pioneers came. There were deer tracks here along the margin of Country Brook, and all the gentle wild life of woods and meadows seemed to pass freely, without care or fear. [Illustration: “Watching the crane and pendant trammels grow black against the blaze.” _See page 18_ ] [Illustration: A corner of the room in which Whittier was born] And so I found all the country about the Whittier homestead an epitome of the free, cheerful, country life of the New England of a century ago. They lighted a fire for me in Whittier’s fireplace--and as the rose glow on the walls of the old living-room brought back the hearth-cheer of bygone years, as the witches, daintily making tea without under the lilac bush, brought the romance and legend of the olden time to the threshold, so the crackling draft of the fire up the deep throat of the chimney seemed to draw in to the place the free, hearty, farming, wood-loving life of the men of the earlier centuries out of which the poet drew what was best in him, to be given out in unforgettable verse to us all. If such a place was ever lonely it was that gentle and desirable loneliness which great souls love. III IN OLD PONKAPOAG _Glimpses from a Study Window of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_ The study where Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest verse looks forth upon a sweet valley. Down this valley prattle clear-eyed brooks that meet and grow, and water lush meadows filled with all lovely things of summer, while low woods beyond set a dark green line against the sunsets. Looking toward these of a day when rosy mists tangle the sun’s rays and anon let them slip in arrow flight earthward, we have pictured for us how “We knew it would rain, for all the morn, A spirit on slender ropes of mist Was lowering its golden buckets down Into the vapory amethyst.”