In after years the rice fields of Georgia, with their embankments and green surfaces, reminded Willis of “the gooseberry pies which formed part of my early education at Andover, and which are among the warmest of my recollections of that classic academy.” “We have fine times picking berries here,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “Every kind grows in profusion in Andover,--raspberries, black, blue, thimble, and whortle berries. The woods are crowded with them. After tea we generally start, and after we have eat enough go and bathe in the Shawsheen, our Andover river.” This Indian Ilyssus was the scene of an adventure recorded in certain “Tête-à-tête Confessions” in the “American Monthly,” doubtless with some exaggerations for literary effect and with a _dénoûment_ suspiciously dramatic. The passage may be given, however, for what it is worth:-- “Cytherean Venus! How I did love Miss Polly D. Low, the pride of the factory on the romantic Shawsheen! I saw her first in the tenderest twilight of a Saturday evening, washing her feet in the river. I was a lad of some impudence, and I sat down on a stone beside her, and by the time it was dark we were the best friends possible. She was beautiful. I think so _now_. She was about eighteen, and, though four years older than I, my education had more than equalized us. At least, if not the wiser of the two, I was the most skilled in the subtlety of love, and practiced with great success _les petites ruses_. She was a tall brunette, and I sometimes fancied, when her eye exhibited more than ordinary feeling, that there was Indian blood under that dark and glowing skin. The valley of the Shawsheen, just below the village where I was at school, is a gem of solitary and rich scenery, and the overhanging woods and long meadows afforded the most picturesque and desirable haunts for ramblers who did not care to be met. There on Sunday afternoons, when she was released from her shuttle and I from my Schrevelius, did we meet and stroll till the nine o’clock bell of the factory summoned her unwillingly home. I could go without my supper in those days, though I doubt if I would now on such slight occasion. By the time vacation came, I found myself seriously in love, declared my passion, and left her with my heart half broken. We were gone four weeks, and when I returned the butcher’s boy was engaged to Miss Low, and I was warned to avoid the factory at the peril of a flogging.”