XIII
The poet’s well-known fondness for young people was not more marked in later life than in his Amesbury days. There was a group of these young people whom he used to call his “boys and girls,” and in whose achievements and successes he felt the greatest interest. His influence over them was not due wholly to that in his character which commanded their admiration, or even to his fun and power of repartee. It came largely from his sympathy with them, his ability to see things from their point of view. And who so well as he brimming over with humor and wit, could enter into and direct their fun? One of this adopted family has recalled when several of them sat in the garden room, each merrily declaring what he or she would do with a fortune, if that would only befall.
“I should put thirty thousand dollars in the bank for John G. Whittier,” declared the poet promptly—thirty thousand dollars being at that time a much larger sum than it is today. “And I should buy M—— [the daughter of his married sister and very fond of pretty gowns] ten new dresses!” And he laughed with his listeners.
To a member of this same group, the one to whom he had given the lilies on the train, he one day made a prediction. She had told him she was going to Centre Harbor, then a famous resort.
“Are thee going alone?” he asked her. She was; but she was to meet a cousin there. “Thee’ll lose thy way,” he said. And when she asserted that she never did that, he persisted, “Thee’ll lose thy trunk at Dover.”
And she actually did!
It is to Whittier that Lucy Larcom refers in her poem about the child,
“Pouring out cups of invisible tea,” and says,