Later, he wrote: “I can say but little for myself. The cold, wet season has been hard for me and has made me very sensible that I am old. I have little strength. Everything tires me. After writing a letter or seeing company, I feel exhausted. “I am here [in Amesbury] at the election, and am glad of the result. I shall probably go back to Danvers soon. I dread the coming winter. But all will be as God wills and that will be best.” But neither age nor illness made him neglect his vote. Later, regretting a friend’s illness, he says: “There is so much to be done in this world and so many of us are unable to take our part in the work our hands find to do.” Again, he dreads the winter. “I wait for it in no defiant mood,” he says, “I can scarcely imagine that I am the same person who used to welcome it.” * * * * * A band of colored singers whom the Hampton Institute had trained to delight Northern ears with their music, came to the poet at Oak Knoll, and standing about him with a reverence born of their knowledge of what he had been to their race, they sang to him. As the poet listened he was filled with remembrances of the days of slavery and the contrast of their present freedom and hope, and wept in gratitude and joy. Happily, the length and sufferings marking the upward road of the race were concealed from him. XXIX “I go to Amesbury this week,” wrote the poet from Oak Knoll in one of his later years, “to attend our Quarterly Meeting there [the Quarterly Meeting of the Friends]. “I have not been very well this spring; but the east winds must be nearly over and I hope I shall feel better.” “I suppose we all need to feel our weakness and dependence upon our Father,” he added, in answer to his correspondent, “and that it is well for us to find ourselves walking the Valley of Humiliation; but I like the hills and the sunshine, after all.” And the hills and the sunshine of joy were what he liked to lead others to when he could. With his invincible diffidence as to his own work, he spoke of “My poem in the ‘Atlantic,’” deprecating its merit but referring to it as a sad revelation of “the old time.” He had written before in the same strain of another of his poems there. * * * * * One day there came to him at Oak Knoll a person who had known him long and well but had recently done something thoughtlessly with which she afterward perceived that he had reason to be offended. She had come to him resolved to tell him of it, and believing that, since he was so kind, this would not be hard to do. But it was hard; and as after the greeting she sat listening and saying little, the sense of her own mistake grew upon her. How could she bear it if he should lose confidence, even in her judgment?