“I have been ill almost ever since the first of September. I managed to go to the Convention at Boston and staid only long enough to vote for Robinson, after which I was ill and sleepless for four days and nights----more than one hundred and twenty hours in all. I am now somewhat better and shall go to Amesbury this week.” XVI In the long winter evenings when the poet’s niece was away at boarding school and storm or some other cause for dearth of visitors had left him and his housekeeper alone together, and his eyes would not permit him to read, or, perhaps when he strove to banish care and pain and the memory of his loss, he would sometimes entertain himself and this Scotswoman with stories. The more absurd these were, the better for him. On occasions they were witch stories, the most horrible New England legends that memory could recall from his extensive reading and his imagination color with new vividness. In the telling of them, manner, tone, words--all would combine to make her flesh creep and her hair stand on end. At last she would laugh. Then he would turn upon her with assumed severity. “Margaret, don’t thee believe it?” “Did you see it, Mr. Whittier?” she would demand, concerning some marvellous vision of the unknown upon which he had been dilating. “No,” he would confess. “But they told me it was so.” And he would join in her mirth. To this never failing sense of humor Whittier owned somewhat of the clearness of his mental outlook, and much of his power of retort. * * * * * But there is something infinitely touching in this trying to make the best of things as he sat by his lonely fireside with the world applauding him. * * * * * In the winter of 1866-67, being detained in Boston by a very severe snow-storm, he wrote to this same housekeeper: “I’m waiting for proofs of ‘Tent on the Beach.’ Live sumptuously; patronize the butcher and baker; and take good care of Charlie [the parrot]; and I’ll be home as soon as I can.” On his arrival a few days later he greeted her with: “Well, Margaret, I’ve been ‘snow bound.’” “Yes,” she answered him. “I don’t know but you’ll have to write another ‘Snow Bound.’” Thought carried him to that loved room where there looked down upon him from the walls the pictured faces of his mother and his sister with, to his imagination, somewhat of the gaze of the far-away reality. He answered her with a sadness in his tone that she never forgot. “There’d be only thee and Charlie and the cat to write about,” he said. His dear ones were ever the undercurrent of his thoughts. In 1881 he wrote from Amesbury, “I am here to be at the election on the sixth. I like to visit Amesbury.... I think sadly of the loss of so many dear friends.” “And yet, dear heart, remembering thee,”