weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient 'ad inferum,' which being interpreted is, 'to the realms below.' Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession!

"What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull. But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same predicament as the honest gentleman in 'Espriella's Letters,'

'I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here, A-musing in my mind what garment I shall

However, by the time of his graduation from Bowdoin College he had laid aside his jesting and doubt, and in the following period of remarkable seclusion spent in his mother's home in Salem he gave himself to the work of composition. Thirteen years he passed thus in a sort of ideal world, so shut away from his neighbors that they scarcely knew of his existence.

Hawthorne always felt that these years of seclusion were peculiarly significant in his life, in that they enabled him to keep, as he said, "the dews of his youth and the freshness of his heart." Still, he realized that he had been much deceived in fancying that there, in his solitary chamber, he could imagine

all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind.

Of all that was written in these years the author gave out for publication only the romance Fanshawe, which he regarded later as a very inferior production, and the various stories published at length in the collection known as Twice Told Tales. Fame came very slowly. Though the worth of these writings was discovered by people of good literary judgment, it was not of the kind to make them widely popular. Sometimes the young author was so overcome by discouragement that it would seem as if only the confidence in his final success felt by his friends could save him from despair.

Relief from this situation came in a most wholesome way. In 1839 George Bancroft secured for Hawthorne a position as weigher and gauger in the Boston Customhouse, and thus his lonely life of brooding came to an end. In discharging his duties he came into much-needed everyday contact with practical men and affairs. This office he held for two years until the Whigs won the presidential election and the Democrats went out of power. Meanwhile he had written Grandfather's Chair, a collection of children's stories concerning early New England history.

Somewhat previous to the appointment to the office in the Customhouse had taken place an event which was even more full of important meaning. While he was living in Salem he had become acquainted with the Peabody family and in their home had met the young woman who later became his wife, and who brought into his life the powerful influence for good that more than anything else

developed the fine qualities of his nature and drew forth his powers as a writer. He had preferred to live hidden away from every one if he must give up the beauty and purity of the thought-world for the harshness and ugliness of the actual world without. But in his association with Sophia Peabody his faith in the reality that lay back of his beautiful visions was so strenghtened that he felt a deep peace and joy never known to him before. The loveliness of her character is shown in her letters, and it is not surprising that Hawthorne should on one occasion write, in response to a letter from her, "I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and, whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy, and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it."

In the summer of 1842 Hawthorne and Miss Peabody were married and went to live in the "Old Manse," in Concord. In the preceding year he had unfortunately invested money in a settlement known as the Brook Farm, where people of different classes of society were to live together on an equality, all sharing alike the duties of the farm life, and all contributing to the expenses of the common living. The experiment proved a failure and Hawthorne withdrew disgusted. With this hope of providing for himself and his wife destroyed, he found it necessary to work industriously, and as a result a new series of stories for children, the Mosses from an Old Manse, appeared in 1846.

In the same year he was made surveyor of the

collection of revenue at the Salem Customhouse. Then for a time he ceased to write, until his discovery among some rubbish in the customhouse of an old manuscript that gave him excellent material for a greater work of fiction than he had ever before attempted, called him back to literary effort. The actual composition of the book was not begun, however, until the day on which Hawthorne lost his position as surveyor.

When he made known this unfortunate event to his wife, instead of becoming depressed, she exclaimed joyfully, "Oh, then, you can write your book!" and a little later, pulling open a drawer, showed him a considerable sum of money that she had been saving all unknown to him. Thus it became possible for him to devote himself to the work that proved to be his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. The unusual excellence of the romance brought to the writer far-spread praise and popularity, and he became at length recognized as a foremost American man of letters.

The Hawthornes now went to live at Lenox, in the mountains of western Massachusetts. In their delightful home in this place the novelist produced a second great romance, The House of the Seven Gables, and then gave up four months to rest. This vacation was largely a playtime spent with his two older children, Una and Julian, the younger daughter Rose being then only a baby. He had worked so hard that he was ready for plenty of fun, and this he and his two young playfellows found in excursions for wild flowers or nuts, in bathing in the lake or sending over its surface home-made toy sail-boats, in romping through the woods or reading