on the polished andirons. A wide staircase leads from the hall to the second story, which is arranged much like the first. Over this is the garret. I need not tell a New England boy what a museum of curiosities is the garret of a wellregulated New England house of fifty or sixty years' standing. Here meet together, as if by some preconcerted arrangement, all the broken-down chairs of the household, all the spavined tables, all the seedy hats, all the intoxicated looking boots, all the split walking sticks that have retired from business, 'weary with the march of life.' The pots, the pans, the trunks, the bottles - who may hope to make an inventory of the numberless odds and ends collected in this bewildering lumber-room? But what a place it is to sit of an afternoon with the rain pattering on the roof! what a place in which to read 'Gulliver's Travels,' or the famous adventures of Rinaldo Rinaldini!"1

At a very early age, however, Tom Bailey was obliged to absent himself for a while from the felicity of this pleasing abode. When he was some eighteen months old Elias

1 This house is now the Aldrich Memorial Museum. Money for its purchase was raised by popular subscription, and through the piety and devotion of the poet's family its interior has been restored with the utmost fidelity. There to-day the visitor may gaze in the very mirrors that reflected Tom Bailey's blithe features, or turn the pages of the books that entranced him on rainy afternoons. In the quaint colonial garden may be found every flower mentioned in his poetry, while in the fireproof room that has been erected may be seen his priceless collection of autograph manuscripts, first editions, and literary relics. A visit here will better acquaint the reader with the background of the poet's youth than many pages of biographical rhetoric.

Aldrich grew restless, as was his wont, and, taking his little family, went out into the wider world to seek a wider fortune. For three years he seems to have wandered far, so far that when he was eighteen his son wrote, perhaps with a little use of hyperbole, that in infancy he had visited every state in the Union. In 1841 the family settled in New York, living at 41 North Moore Street, just around the corner from Hudson Street, where in 1843 Laurence Hutton, one of Aldrich's intimates of later years, was born. For four years, with long summers in Portsmouth, the Aldriches continued to dwell in New York. Finally, in 1846, in company with Charles L. Frost, who had married another of Mr. Bailey's daughters, Elias Aldrich moved with his family to New Orleans, and invested his little property in a commission business, "so securely that he was never able to get more than half of it out again."

For three years this was our poet's home, and it is perhaps not too fantastic a speculation to suppose that from those early days in the old Creole city, with its strange, tropical beauty, its exotic sounds and scents, he drew imaginative clues to a richer and more romantic life than was commonly to be observed among the dwellers upon the North Shore, with their preoccupations, commercial and transcendental. In the spring and fall the boy would be taken on tradingtrips up and down the Mississippi, and to the end of his life he could vividly recall the weird-flaring torches of the negroes who came down to light their landings. And in a late letter there is a lively remembrance of the "sweet blond

saints" in the New Orleans Cathedral. The psychologizing critic may like to find in these early impressions the root of that somewhat exotic impulse that later begat the aromatic verse of his "Cloth of Gold." And, perhaps, in his childish relations with a subject race, the reader will recall the affectionate kicking of little black Sam in "The Story of a Bad Boy," - we may find one secondary source of a certain amiable and engaging assurance that always marked his manner.

As the boy grew older the limitations of Southern schools began to be evident, and finally, in the spring of 1849, he was taken back to Portsmouth to prepare to enter Harvard College. In the autumn the calamity of death first touched his life. In September Elias Aldrich set out to return by himself to New Orleans. After his departure Mrs. Aldrich was tormented nightly by dreams of death and disaster to her husband. Unable to withstand her anxiety, she journeyed hastily to New Orleans. There she found that Elias Aldrich had died of the cholera on October 6, on a Mississippi River steamer, at Memphis. Three months later she came home, bringing her husband's body to be interred in Greenwood Cemetery.1

In the mean time the boy had been put to school in Portsmouth, and then began those golden boyish years in the Nutter House that have been immortalized in one of the

1 The date of Elias Aldrich's death has hitherto been variously stated in print as 1850, 1851, and 1852. The date of 1849 is substantiated by the records of the Cemetery.