home town. The ten years that Larcom spent at the mills made a huge impact on her. The Lowell Offering, a magazine whose editors and contributors were "female operatives in the Lowell mills," was published 1839-1845, and soon after it was launched Larcom became one of its corps of writers. One of her first poems was entitled "The River," and many of her verses and essays were found in its volumes. Some of those Lowell Offering essays appeared afterwards in Similitudes, her first published work. It was at one of the meetings of the literary circle, established among the "mill girls", that Larcom first met the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, who was then in Lowell editing a Free Soil journal. He became her friend, showing his real interest in her at once by criticising her share in the written contributions of the evening. She was then very young, but it was the beginning of an interest and gratitude that continued mutually in an established friendship. Afterward, when she had come to know and dearly love Whittier's sister, Elizabeth ("Lizzie"), the three spent time together. During happy sojourns at Salisbury Beach, near the respective homes at Amesbury and Beverly, in visits at Amesbury, in counsel and work together, out of which in recent time have grown the beautiful compilations of Child-life, and Songs of Three Centuries, their lives ran near together and contributed the one to the other. Illinois One after another, Larcom's sisters married out of the home, until only two remained. At about twenty years of age, Larcom accompanied the oldest of the Larcom sisters in Lowell, Emeline, to the then wild prairies of Illinois. Here, she shared in the efforts of a clergyman's household in pioneer times. A truly pioneer life was theirs as they moved many times from place to place, dependent upon who summoned the clergyman. Somewhere in this prairie Larcom taught school in a vacated log building to a neighborhood. Her students came from small colonies within this radius. It was in the corner of a big township which included three counties. She taught under the auspices of a district committee, before whom, previous to induction to office, the candidate was obliged to hold up her right hand and swear to acquaintance, sufficient to instruct from, with writing, spelling, arithmetic, and geography. Her salary was for three months; and once, when the time for payment