Amesbury has among its attractions a Lion’s Mouth!  In the old days of Indian ambushes it must have earned its right to the name.  But now the only existing danger is lest one should be eaten up—­with kindness.  It is a short mile from the mills, and a pleasant walk in spite of its ending!  At last there comes a little hollow with a large farm-house on the left, and a grass road winding past it at right angles with the main road and leading into beautiful woods.  These woods are the very jaws of the lion; and it is very hard, on a hot summer’s day, for those who go into them to come out again.  A few rods up the road from the hollow are other houses.  People bearing some of the earliest recorded names in Amesbury, descendants of the brave pioneers, are to be found here, or having departed this life, have left good records behind them.  One of these latter lived here in the pleasantest way.  He and his wife carried on their large farm in an ideal manner; everything was upon a generous scale.  There was money enough not to wear out life in petty economies, and largeness of soul enough not to put the length of a bank account against the beauties and refinements of life.  The loss of their only child, and a few years afterward of their grand-daughter, one of the loveliest children earth ever held, was—­not compensated for, that can never be, but made much less dreary by a friendship of many years’ standing between them and their summer neighbors.  In this case, too, the gentleman is a native of Amesbury, proud and fond of his birthplace.  Every summer he comes to the cottage of this friend, a charming little house only a few rods from the larger one, and spends the summer here with his family and servants.  He has made a great deal of money in New York, but fortunately, not too much, for it has not built up a Chinese wall around his heart; his new friends are dear, but his early friends are still the dearest.

Between the Mills and this formidable Mouth of the Lion, is the Quaker Meeting House, a modest, sober-hued building on a triangular green, on which, before it was fenced in, the boys delighted to play ball on the days and at the hours (for the Quakers have meeting Thursday also) on which the grave worshippers were not filing into what cannot fairly be called the house of silence, because it has been known to echo to exhortations as earnest, if not as vehement as one may hear from any pulpit.  Still, there are sometimes long intervals of silence, and then the consciousness that silent self-examination is one purpose of the coming together, gives an impressiveness to the simple surroundings.  It must have been here that Mr. Whittier learned to interpret so wonderfully that silent prayer of Agassiz for guidance when he opened his famous school from which he was so soon called to a higher life.