for an hour or so, two or three times a week; and no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of doors again, than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your mind. You go whistling about, and take no more care what you're thinking of than if your heads were gutters for any rubbish that happened to be in the way, and if you get a good notion in 'em, it's pretty soon washed out again.

"You think knowledge is to be had cheap- you'll come and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a week, and he'll make you clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowledge isn't to be had by paying sixpence, let me tell you. If you're to know figures, you must turn 'em over in your own heads, and keep your thoughts on 'em. There's nothing you can't turn into a sum, for there's nothing but what has number in it—even a fool. You may say to yourselves, 'I'm one fool and Jack's another; if my fool's head weighed four pounds and Jack's three pounds three ounces and three-quarters, how much heavier would my head be than Jack's?'

"A man that has his heart in learning figures would make sums for himself and work 'em in his head. When he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stitches by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and then see how much money he could get in an hour; and then ask himself how much money he'd get in a day at that rate; and then how much ten workmen would get working three, or

twenty, or a hundred years at that rate—and all the while his needle would be going just as fast as if he left his head empty.

"But the long and short of it is - I'll have nobody in my night-school that doesn't strive to learn what he came to learn, as hard as if he were striving to get out of a dark hole into broad daylight. I'll send no man away because he is stupid; if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to learn anything, I'd not refuse to teach him. But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the six-pennyworth, and carry it away with them as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you have been working with your own heads, instead of thinking you can pay mine to work for you. That's the last word I have to say to you."

With this final sentence, Bartle Massey gave a sharper rap than ever with his knobbed stick.

MARY ANN EVANS (CROSS) (1819-1880), was an English novelist who wrote under the name of George Eliot. The extract here given is from "Adam Bede." Her "Silas Marner," and "The Mill on the Floss" are also of remarkable interest.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

ONE day, when I was about nineteen years old, I was dining at a restaurant in Boston, when some one near me suddenly said, "There is Whittier!" I saw before me a tall, slender man, with olive complexion, black hair, straight black eyebrows, and brilliant eyes; this was Whittier the poet, then thirty-five years old.

All my appetite vanished. I knew many of his poems by heart, and I was resolved to speak to him. As he rose from the table, I went up to him and said, with a boyish awkwardness and shyness, “I should like to shake hands with the author of 'Massachusetts to Virginia.'"

The poet looked up as if a little frightened, for he was then, as all through his life, one of the shyest of men. Then he smiled kindly and said briefly, "Thy name, friend?" I gave it, we shook hands, and that was all. But for me the incident was like touching a hero's shield; and though I afterward knew Whittier very well and saw and talked with him many times, I never could forget the pleasure of that first boyish interview.

John Greenleaf Whittier was born in Haverhill, Mass., December 17, 1807. His ancestor, Thomas W. Whittier, was of Huguenot (that is, French Prot

estant) descent, and had sailed from Southampton for America in 1638. He was then eighteen years old and weighed three hundred pounds, being also very strong. Of the ten children that he afterwards had, the five boys were each over six feet tall.

John Greenleaf, his descendant, was not quite so tall as this, and never physically strong; yet he was brought up to hard work on the farm. Every day he milked seven cows, and tended a horse, two oxen, and some sheep. He has given us a description of the days of his early boyhood in his poem called "The Barefoot Boy." Every schoolboy should know this whole poem by heart.

Mr.

Whittier sent his first attempt at verse, signed simply by the initial W., to a weekly newspaper, the Free Press, published in Newburyport. Garrison, the editor, was so impressed with this first poem, called "The Exile's Departure," that he wished to discover who had written it. He finally found out one day from the postman (or post-rider as he was then called, for the mail was carried on horseback in those days, and not on foot as it is now) that the writer was a young Quaker lad of seventeen, working at a shoemaker's bench at East Haverhill.

Garrison immediately jumped into a carriage and drove to see the young poet. Whittier, when summoned, came into the room blushing like a girl, and even afraid to speak. Garrison spoke some kind words of encouragement to the boy, and begged his

father and mother to send him to school, and to do everything that they could to make it possible for him to keep on writing.

Now the elder Whittier did not object to his son's writing poetry, - in fact, he was rather proud of it; but he had very little money, and found it difficult to keep his large family clothed and fed. Even the little money which John earned at the shoemaker's bench helped the family along, and the father did not see where the money was to come from to send the boy to school.

By and by, however, the editor of the Haverhill Gazette, Mr. A. W. Thayer, offered to let the boy come and live in his family while he was attending Haverhill Academy. This arrangement was finally agreed to, and John earned the money to pay for his schooling by doing extra work on a kind of slipper that had just been invented. He was very careful in money matters, and reckoned his expenses so closely that he planned to have twenty-five cents left at the end of the year, and he had it.

After leaving the academy, Whittier became editor of a paper called the American Manufacturer. He earned nine dollars a week, half of which went toward paying off the mortgage on his father's farm.

When he was twenty-four years old the first volume of his poems was published. It was called "Legends of New England." The poet afterward disliked this book so much that he sometimes used