Occasionally a stranger knocked at the door of the old homestead in the valley; sometimes it was a distinguished Quaker from abroad, but oftener it was a peddler or some vagabond begging for food, which was seldom refused.  Once a foreigner came and asked for lodgings for the night—­a dark, repulsive man, whose appearance was so much against him that Mrs. Whittier was afraid to admit him.  No sooner had she sent him away, however, than she repented.  “What if a son of mine was in a strange land?” she thought.  The young poet (who was not yet recognized as such) offered to go out in search of him, and presently returned with him, having found him standing in the roadway just as he had been turned away from another house.

[Illustration:  JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER]

“He took his seat with us at the supper-table,” says Whittier in one of his prose sketches, “and when we were all gathered around the hearth that cold autumnal evening, he told us, partly by words and partly by gestures, the story of his life and misfortunes, amused us with descriptions of the grape-gatherings and festivals of his sunny clime, edified my mother with a recipe for making bread of chestnuts, and in the morning, when, after breakfast, his dark sallow face lighted up, and his fierce eyes moistened with grateful emotion as in his own silvery Tuscan accent he poured out his thanks, we marveled at the fears which had so nearly closed our doors against him, and as he departed we all felt that he had left with us the blessing of the poor.”

Another guest came to the house one day.  It was a vagrant old Scotchman, who, when he had been treated to bread and cheese and cider, sang some of the songs of Robert Burns, which Whittier then heard for the first time, and which he never forgot.  Coming to him thus as songs reached the people before printing was invented, through gleemen and minstrels, their sweetness lingered in his ears, and he soon found himself singing in the same strain.  Some of his earliest inspirations were drawn from Burns, and he tells us of his joy when one day, after the visit of the old Scotchman, his schoolmaster loaned him a copy of that poet’s works.  “I began to make rhymes myself, and to imagine stories and adventures,” he says in his simple way.

Indeed, he began to rhyme very early and kept his gift a secret from all, except his oldest sister, fearing that his father, who was a prosaic man, would think that he was wasting time.  He wrote under the fence, in the attic, in the barn—­wherever he could escape observation; and as pen and ink were not always available, he sometimes used chalk, and even charcoal.  Great was the surprise of the family when some of his verses were unearthed, literally unearthed, from under a heap of rubbish in a garret; but his father frowned upon these evidences of the bent of his mind, not out of unkindness, but because he doubted the sufficiency of the boy’s education for a literary life, and did not wish to inspire him with hopes which might never be fulfilled.