But it is very easy to detect, in her loving descriptions, many of her young companions, who shared with her the simplicity of those days of toil; and in following with her the career of some of those bright spirits, and watching their success in their varied pathways through life, it is very pleasant for me to be able to corroborate what she has said. Riches have fallen to the lot of some of those young girls, and to others a degree of distinction in various situations and occupations; but have they not, from their better surroundings, ever looked back, as she does, to those dear old simple days, so full of health and endeavor, so free from care, as among the happiest of their lives? Then, ignorance of the world was bliss, and hope and aspiration reigned supreme. My first recollection of Lucy Larcom is as a precocious writer of verses in _The Lowell Casket_, where the editor, Mr. George Brown, in his notice of them, said, “They were written by a young lady of thirteen, who was beyond a doubt inspired by the _Nurses_,”--a misprint, of course, for “Muses;” although the author was so young, that the mistake was not so far wrong. This, however, was not her first attempt at verse-making, since she began to write while a child of seven or eight years, in the attic of her early home in Beverly. The title of these first verses was “A Thunder Storm,” and they were read with wonder by her admiring brothers and sisters. Two pictures of her in that early factory-life remain in my memory. By the Merrimack River, whose romantic banks she loved to describe, on a bridge which crossed a narrow part of the stream, I once passed her, a tall and bonnie young girl, with her head in the clouds. After a little nod of recognition, as I looked up at her,--for, although she was only a year older than I, she was much larger and more mature,--she went on. But to me she seemed so grand, so full of thought, that, with girlish admiration for one who had written _verses_, I forgot my errand, turned, stood still, and thoughtfully watched her out of sight.