CHAPTER IV
STORIES OF THE POET’S CHILDHOOD
The Whittiers seem to have been a simple-minded family. Some stories told of the poet in his childhood would almost make you think him stupid, but no one seems ever to interpret them in that way.
He remembered nothing that happened before he was six years old; but about that time he heard that a neighboring farm had been sold at auction. The next morning he went out and was surprised to find the land still there, instead of a big hole in the ground; for he seemed to think that after the farm was sold it would be taken away.
When he was nine years old, President Monroe visited Haverhill, and happened to be there on the same day that a menagerie came to town. The Quaker boy was not allowed to see either. He thought he did not care much for the wild beasts, but he would have liked to see the greatest man in the United States. The next day he trudged over to the village, hoping to see at least some footprints that the great man had left behind him. He found at last the impressions of an elephant’s feet in the road, and supposing these to be the tracks of the President, he followed them as far as he could make them out. Then he went home satisfied that he had seen the footsteps of the greatest man in the country.
At another time he and his brother calculated that if each could lift the other by his boot straps, first one lifting and then the other, they might lift themselves up to the ceiling, and no telling how much higher. Of course when they tried it they didn’t get very far.
In later life he used to tell a story of how children sometimes suffer needlessly, and in ways of which their parents little dream. When he went to ride with his father, they used to walk up a certain hill, in order to rest the horse. By the side of the road there was a gander, which had come out from a neighboring farmyard; and he says he would rather in later life have walked up to a hostile cannon than as a child go by that gander. But he was ashamed to let his father know his fear, and so walked past in an agony of dread.
There is also told an interesting story of an ox named Old Butler. One day Greenleaf went out with some salt for the oxen. He was climbing up the side of a steep hill when Old Butler, on top, saw him, and came plunging down. The hill was so steep that the ox could not stop, and in a moment he would have crushed the young master; but gathering himself together at the right moment, the creature by a great effort leaped straight out into the air over the head of the boy. It was the wonderful intelligence of this ox that saved young Greenleaf’s life.
Another amusing story is also told of this ox. Once a Quaker meeting was being held in the kitchen. Unexpectedly the ox stuck his head in at the window. While a sweet-voiced sister was speaking he listened quietly; but when a loud-voiced brother began to speak, he drew out his head, flung up his tail, and went off bellowing. This the children thought very funny and a good joke on the brother.