Talked with me from fall to fall;
Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
Mine on bending orchard trees,
Apples of Hesperides!
Still as my horizon grew,
Larger grew my riches, too;
All the world I saw or knew
Seemed a complex Chinese toy,
Fashioned for a barefoot boy!"[1]

[Illustration: THE OLD SCHOOL-HOUSE, HAVERHILL, MASS.]

I doubt if any boy ever rose to intellectual eminence who had fewer
opportunities for education than Whittier. He had no such pasturage to
browse on as is open to every reader who, by simply reaching them out,
can lay his hands on the treasures of English literature. He had to
borrow books wherever they could be found among the neighbors who were
willing to lend, and he thought nothing of walking several miles for one
volume. The only instruction he received was at the district school,
which was open a few weeks in midwinter, and at the Haverhill Academy,
which he attended two terms of six months each, paying tuition by work
in spare hours, and by keeping a small school himself. A feeble spirit
would have languished under such disadvantages. But Whittier scarcely
refers to them, and instead of begging for pity, he takes them as part
of the common lot, and seems to remember only what was beautiful and
good in his early life.

Occasionally a stranger knocked at the door of the old homestead in the
valley; sometimes it was a distinguished Quaker from abroad, but oftener