Among these gifts was a very handsome silver cake-basket, for cake-baskets were then in vogue. Several times had Lizzie attempted to grace the table with this when guests were present. But her uncle had always left his guests to make an errand to the dining-room just before the meal, and the tabooed basket had always vanished from the table. But when George MacDonald, accompanied by his wife and son came to Amesbury to give his lecture, because, as has been said, he could be the guest of Whittier, Lizzie felt that if the opportunity to display the cake-basket was ever to come, it should be then. But how could she do it? For her uncle, with all his pleasure in his guests was not too much absorbed in his brother poet to omit the preliminary survey of the table. The cake-basket was not there. Well-pleased, he returned to his guests. It was when the summons to the evening meal had been given and the company was about to be seated, that Lizzie appeared, in her hand the well-filled cake-basket which she placed conspicuously upon the table and made haste to seat herself behind the teacups. If the poet, who never missed the humorous side of anything, did not strike his hand upon his knee and cry his familiar utterance, “Capital! Capital!” it was because at the moment the situation made it impossible to him. He surely appreciated his niece no less because she--one of his own family--had done what his foes, political and personal, had never been able to accomplish--outwitted him! XXIII Whittier sometimes received suggestions for his poems from stories told him directly, possibly, for the purpose, as was the case with the episode of “Barbara Frietchie.” But, no doubt, persons often gave him suggestions for poems without suspecting that they were doing so. “I should think the old captain would come out of his grave, Mr. Whittier,” cried indignantly, Mrs. M----, a neighbor and friend, as she sat one evening in the garden room making complaint of a use, or, rather, of a disuse of something over which the members of the Improvement Society of the town--she being one--who were busy looking up its many antiquities, were very wrathful. “Yes, I should think he would come out of his grave,” she repeated, “to see that old well of his which he dug himself for the free use of the public all covered over with rubbish in this way. It ought to be opened up.” She went on to free her mind still more concerning public rights and the neglect of these, as illustrated in the case of the old well dug by Valentine Bagley for the wayfarer, so that none who passed by might have to endure a tithe of the agony of thirst that he himself had known when at one time lost in the desert. Then in his distress he had vowed that should he ever return to his home, he would dig a well as a thank-offering. This was the well. But what had been intended for a boon had become useless from neglect--a disfigurement.