It may be well to mention here that Improvement Circles continued to be formed, and that in 1843 there were at least five in different parts of the city. I attended one in 1845, connected with _The Lowell Offering_. It met in the publication office, on Central Street, and was well filled with factory operatives, some of whom had brought their contributions, and waited to hear them read, with quaking hearts and conscious faces. Harriet Farley presided, and from a pile of manuscript on the table before her selected such contributions as she thought the most worthy of a public reading. Among these, as I remember, were the chapters of a novel by Miss Curtis, one of Lucy Larcom’s prose poems, and some “pieces of poetry.” Included in these pieces were some verses in which the wind was described as playing havoc with nature to such an extent that-- “It took the tall trees by the hair, And as with besoms swept the air.” This tremendous breeze, or simile, caused a good deal of mirth among the younger contributors, who had never heard of “The World-Soul,” nor read Emerson’s line-- “To the green-haired forest free,” nor Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” where he speaks of the pine-trees as-- “Shorn of their streaming hair.” Nor yet Wordsworth’s sonnet:-- “While trees, dim seen, in frenzied numbers tear The lingering remnant of their yellow hair.” This was my only appearance at the Circle, as I had hitherto been deterred from going by the knowledge that those who went were expected to bring a written contribution to be read there. Shortly after this, Miss Farley (one of the editors) invited me to send something to the magazine, and I complied; but I was not an early or a constant contributor. In 1839, the Rev. Abel C. Thomas and the Rev. Thomas B. Thayer, pastors of the First and Second Universalist Churches in Lowell, established improvement circles composed of the young people belonging to their respective parishes. These meetings were largely made up of young men and women who worked in the mill. They were often asked to speak; but as they persistently declined, they were invited to write what they desired to say, and send it, to be read anonymously at the next meeting. Many of the young women complied with this request, and these written communications were so numerous that they very soon became the sole entertainment of what Mr. Thomas called “these intellectual banquets.”