took part in bearing the corpse or in steadying it. From the bank of the river to her father's house was nearly half a mile of pasture-ground, on the ascent of a hill; and our burden grew very heavy before we reached the door. What a midnight procession it was! How strange and fearful it would have seemed if it could have been foretold, a day beforehand, that I should help carry a dead body along that track! At last we reached the door, where appeared an old gray-haired man, holding a light; he said nothing, seemed calm, and after the body was laid upon a large table, in what seemed to be the kitchen, the old man disappeared. This was the grandfather. Good Mrs. Pratt was in the room, having been sent for to assist in laying out the body, but she seemed wholly at a loss how to proceed; and no wonder, for it was an absurd idea to think of composing that rigidly distorted figure into the decent quiet of the coffin. A Mrs. Lee had likewise been summoned, and shortly appeared,—a withered, skin-and-bone-looking woman; but she too, though a woman of skill, was in despair at the job, and confessed her ignorance how to set about it. Whether the poor girl did finally get laid out, I know not; but can scarcely think it possible. I have since been told that on stripping the body they found a strong cord wound round the waist and drawn tight,- for what purpose is impossible to guess.

'Ah, poor child!' that was the exclamation of an elderly man, as he helped draw her out of the

water. I suppose one friend would have saved her; but she died for want of sympathy,

a severe pen

alty for having cultivated and refined herself out of the sphere of her natural connections.

She is said to have gone down to the river at five in the morning, and to have been seen walking to and fro on the bank, so late as seven, there being all that space of final struggle with her misery. She left a diary, which is said to exhibit (as her whole life did) many high and remarkable traits. The idea of suicide was not a new one with her; she had before attempted it, walking up to her chin in the water, but coming back again, in compassion to the agony of a sister who stood on the bank. She appears to have been religious and of a high morality.

"The reason, probably, that the body remained so near the spot where she drowned herself, was that it had sunk to the bottom of perhaps the deepest spot in the river, and so was out of the action of the current."

CHAPTER VII.

SALEM.

FOUR years in his native town of Salem succeeded Hawthorne's four years' residence in Concord. The period is externally definable as that in which he held the post of Surveyor in the Salem Custom House, and wrote "The Scarlet Letter." In its more interior aspect it was a season of ripened manhood, of domestic happiness and sorrow, of the bringingup of children, of the broadening and deepening of character. The country was exchanged for the town; and something symbolical, perhaps, may be divined. in the change. The man was made to feel, more intimately than heretofore, the strength and beauty of human sympathies; and the lovely experience of married happiness which he enjoyed, raised him to a moral standpoint from which he was enabled clearly to discern and state the nature and consequences of unfaithfulness, which form the theme of his memorable Romance.

The Hawthornes occupied, in succession, three houses during their Salem residence. The first was the old family mansion in Herbert Street, where they had for fellow-inmates Madame Hawthorne

and the two sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa. This proved inconvenient; and they afterwards rented, for a short time, a house in Chestnut Street. Their third and final abode was in Mall Street; and here there was room enough for the accommodation of Hawthorne's mother and sisters in a separate part of the house, so that the two families were enabled to carry on their respective existences with no further contact than might be voluntary on their part. It was in this house that Madame Hawthorne died; and not long after that event, Hawthorne, no longer one of the obscurest men of letters in America, but the author of one of America's most famous novels, removed to Lenox, in the county of Berkshire, Massachusetts.

The Salem letters and journals which constitute the bulk of this chapter are full of references to Hawthorne's children, to the daughter, Una, born in Concord, and to the son, Julian, who came into the world two years later. Some of these references the biographer has thought fit to retain. A human being before he or she becomes a self-conscious individual possesses a certain charm which every humane person acknowledges; for the very reason that it is a natural and spontaneous charm, instead of being the result of character. There is something universal in it; the doings and sayings of a child, so far as they are childlike, are the doings and sayings of all children. The consideration which has weight in the present instance, however, is by no means the value to the

biography of the children themselves. That could, at best, be but very small; it would be limited to such reflection of the parents' characteristics as might be perceived or imagined in the offspring. But the attitude of the father and mother towards their children, the manner of their dealings with them, and the calling-forth in the former of traits and phases of nature and character which are manifested only in response to the children's demand, — these are considerations which no biographer can afford to neglect; on the contrary, he may deem himself fortunate when he finds such material at hand. Moreover, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife so merged their own personal aims and desires in the welfare and interests of their children, that it would be impossible to give an intelligible picture of their domestic career, were the children to be blotted out of it.

The writer offers this explanation less out of a desire to shield his own modesty than in order to protect the vicarious delicacy and fastidiousness of a certain class of readers; and, in the hope that his attempt has not been unsuccessful, will proceed with his narrative.

Early in the new year Mrs. Hawthorne wrote to her mother:

SALEM, HERBERT ST., January, 1846. ... Una's force is immense. I am glad to see such will, since there is also a fund of loveliness. No one, I think, has a right to break the will of a