LATER DAYS.
About a mile westward from the village of Danvers, Mass., a grassy road, named Summer Street, branches off to the right and north. It is a pleasant, winding road, bordered by picturesque old stone fences and lined with barberry and raspberry bushes and gnarled old apple-trees. On either side are cultivated fields. Oak Knoll, the winter residence of Whittier, is the second house on the left, some half a mile up the road.
This fine old estate had been occupied for half a century by a man of wealth and taste. About the year 1875 it passed into the hands of Col. Edmund Johnson, of Boston, whose wife was Whittier's cousin.
It was planned that the poet should be a member of the household; rooms were set apart and arranged for him, and he gave the estate its present name.
It is a spot full of traditions, and well suited to any poet's residence, most of all for one so versed in New England legends. It is the very spot once occupied by the Rev. George Burroughs, a clergyman who was hung for witchcraft in 1692, on the charge, among other things, of "having performed feats of extraordinary physical strength." He could hold out a gun seven feet long, tradition says, by putting his finger in the muzzle, and could lift a barrel of molasses in the same way by the bung-hole. For acts like these—deemed unclerical, at least, if not unnatural—he was convicted and hanged; and a well on the premises of Oak Knoll is still known as the "witch well."
Here, in the home of relatives, the poet has lived since 1876. A lovelier and more poetical place it would be difficult to imagine. The extensive, carefully kept grounds, and the antique elegance of the house, give to the estate the air of an old English manor, or gentleman's country hall. The house is approached by a long, upward-sweeping lawn, diversified with stately forest trees, clumps of evergreens and shrubs and flowers. Down across the road stands a large and handsome barn, which is as neat as paint and care can make it. In front of the house the eye ranges downward over an extensive landscape, as far as to the town of Peabody, in the direction of Salem. Indeed, on every side of the estate there are broad and distant views of the blue hills of Essex and Middlesex.
