About this time Mr. Whittier accompanied his mother to a quarterly meeting of the Society of Friends at Salem, and one morning before breakfast took a walk of a few miles to the quaint old town of Marblehead, where he paid a visit to the home of his schoolmate. She could not invite him in, but instead suggested a stroll along the picturesque, rocky shore of the bay. This was in the spring or early summer of 1828, and the poet was twenty years old, a farmer's boy, with high ambitions, but with no outlook as yet toward any profession. It may be imagined that the young couple, after a discussion of the situation, saw the hopelessness of securing the needed consent of their parents, and returned from their morning's walk with saddened hearts. Whatever dreams they may have cherished were from that hour abandoned, and they parted with this understanding. In the next fifty years they met but once again, four or five years after the morning walk, and this once was at Marblehead, along the shore. Miss Bray had in the meantime been teaching in a seminary in Mississippi, and Whittier had been editing papers in Boston and Hartford, and had published his first book, a copy of which he had sent her. There was no renewal at this time of their lover-like relations, and they parted in friendship. I have said that they met but once in the half-century after that morning's walk; the truth is they were once again close together, but Whittier was not conscious of it. This was while he was editing the _Pennsylvania Freeman_, at Philadelphia. Miss Bray was then associated with a Miss Catherine Beecher, in an educational movement of considerable importance, and was visiting Philadelphia. Just at this time a noted Massachusetts divine, Reverend Doctor Todd, was announced to preach in the Presbyterian church, and both these Haverhill schoolmates were moved to hear him. By a singular chance they occupied the same pew, and sat close together, but Miss Bray was the only one who was conscious of this, and she was too shy to reveal herself. It must have been her bonnet hid her face, for otherwise Whittier's remarkably keen eyes could not have failed to recognise the dear friend of his school-days. Their next meeting was at the reunion of the Haverhill Academy class of 1827, which was held in 1885, half a century after their second interview at Marblehead. It was said by some that it was this schoolboy love which Whittier commemorated in his poem, "Memories." But Mr. Pickard, the poet's biographer, affirms that, so far as known, the only direct reference made by Whittier to the affair under consideration occurred in the fine poem, "A Sea Dream," written in 1874. In the poet, now an old man, the sight of Marblehead awakens the memory of that morning walk, and he writes: "Is this the wind, the soft sea wind That stirred thy locks of brown? Are these the rocks whose mosses knew The trail of thy light gown, Where boy and girl sat down?