case in three different courts, and now sends to the Supreme Court a ‘Bill of Exceptions,’ which all my friends think he cannot recover. It has been a great trouble and expense to me. But I have carried the case in prayer to God, constantly, and He has three times defeated the extortioner.” Willis always retained a cordial affection and respect for his father, but between two such different natures and divergent lives there could be little genial sympathy or real intellectual intimacy. The tough old deacon outlived the inheritor of his name and calling by some three years, and died May 26, 1870, at the age of ninety. For his mother Willis cherished, as boy and man, a devotion that may well be called passionate, and which found utterance in many of his most heartfelt poems, such as his “Birth-Day Verses,” “Lines on Leaving Europe,” and “To my Mother from the Apennines.” Her maiden name was Hannah Parker. She was born at Holliston, Massachusetts, and was two years younger than her husband. She was a woman whose strong character and fervent piety were mingled with a playful affectionateness which made her to her children the object of that perfect love which casteth out fear. Like many another poet’s mother,--like Goethe’s, for example,--she supplied to her son those elements of gayety and softness which were wanting in the stiffer composition of the father:-- “Von Mutterchen die Fröhnatur, Die Lust zu fabuliren.” He inherited from her the emotional, impulsive part of his nature as well as his physical constitution, his light complexion, full face, and tendency, in youth, to a plethoric habit. “My veins,” he wrote, “are teeming with the quicksilver spirit which my mother gave me. Whatever I accomplish must be gained by ardor, and not by patience.” She was his confidant, his sympathizer, his elder sister. The testimony to her worth and her sweetness is universal. The Rev. Dr. Storrs of Braintree, in an obituary notice written on her death, in 1844, at the age of sixty-two, spoke of her as “the light and joy of every circle in which she moved; the idol of her family; the faithful companion, the tender mother, the affectionate sister, the fast and assiduous friend.” Willis was the second in a family of nine children, all of whom reached maturity, and two of whom, besides himself, achieved literary reputation. These were Sarah Payson Willis, afterwards famous, under the _nom de plume_ of “Fanny Fern,” as a prolific and successful writer for children, and Richard Storrs Willis, his youngest brother, formerly editor of the “Musical World,” the author of “Our Church Music,” and known both as a musical composer and a poet. Julia Willis, his favorite sister and constant correspondent, was also a woman of remarkable talent, with a gift of tongues and a sounder scholarship than her more showy brother. She wrote many of the book reviews in the “Home Journal,” but always declined to renounce her anonymity.