Another guest came to the house one day. It was a vagrant old Scotchman, who, when he had been treated to bread and cheese and cider, sang some of the songs of Robert Burns, which Whittier then heard for the first time, and which he never forgot. Coming to him thus as songs reached the people before printing was invented, through gleemen and minstrels, their sweetness lingered in his ears, and he soon found himself singing in the same strain. Some of his earliest inspirations were drawn from Burns, and he tells us of his joy when one day, after the visit of the old Scotchman, his schoolmaster loaned him a copy of that poet's works. "I began to make rhymes myself, and to imagine stories and adventures," he says in his simple way. Indeed, he began to rhyme very early and kept his gift a secret from all, except his oldest sister, fearing that his father, who was a prosaic man, would think that he was wasting time. He wrote under the fence, in the attic, in the barn--wherever he could escape observation; and as pen and ink were not always available, he sometimes used chalk, and even charcoal. Great was the surprise of the family when some of his verses were unearthed, literally unearthed, from under a heap of rubbish in a garret; but his father frowned upon these evidences of the bent of his mind, not out of unkindness, but because he doubted the sufficiency of the boy's education for a literary life, and did not wish to inspire him with hopes which might never be fulfilled. His sister had faith in him, nevertheless, and, without his knowledge, she sent one of his poems to the editor of _The Free Press_, a newspaper published in Newburyport. Whittier was helping his father to repair a stone wall by the roadside when the carrier flung a copy of the paper to him, and, unconscious that anything of his was in it, he opened it and glanced up and down the columns. His eyes fell on some verses called "The Exile's Departure." "Fond scenes, which delighted my youthful existence, With feelings of sorrow I bid ye adieu-- A lasting adieu; for now, dim in the distance, The shores of Hibernia recede from my view. Farewell to the cliffs, tempest-beaten and gray, Which guard the loved shores of my own native land; Farewell to the village and sail-shadowed bay, The forest-crowned hill and the water-washed strand." His eyes swam; it was his own poem, the first he ever had in print. [Illustration: WHITTIER'S STUDY AT AMESBURY, MASS.]