"
It was perhaps in this same year, 1866, that we made an autumn visit
to Whittier which is still a well-remembered pleasure. The weather was
warm and the fruit was ripening in the little Amesbury garden. We
loitered about for a while, I remember, in the afternoon, among the
falling pear leaves and in the sweet air, but he soon led the way into
his garden-room, and fell into talk. He was an adept in the art of
conversation, having trained himself in the difficult school of a New
England farmhouse, fit ground for such athletics, being typically bare
of suggestion and of relief from outside resources. The unbroken
afternoons and the long evenings, when the only hope of entertainment
is in such fire as one brain can strike from another, produce a
situation as difficult to the unskilled as that of an untaught swimmer
when first cast into the sea. Persons long habituated to these
contests could face the position calmly, and see the early "tea-things"
disappear and the contestants draw their chairs around the
fire with a kind of zeal; but to one new to such experience there was
room for heart-sinkings when preparations were made, by putting fresh
sticks on the fire, for sitting from gloaming to vespers, and
sometimes on again unwearied till midnight.
Mrs. Stowe and Whittier were the invincible Lancelots of these
tourneys, and any one who has had the privilege of sitting by the New
England hearthstone with either of them will be ready to confess that
no playhouse, or game, or any of the distractions the city may afford,
can compare with the satisfaction of such an experience.
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