with handsome features.  My quick movement forward in the carriage he took for a bow and he returned it raising his hat with gentlemanly courtesy, it was all through a mistake that I got this bow from Hawthorne but all the same I treasure it.  A sister-in-law of his, who was often an inmate of his home, told me that Hawthorne really believed in ghosts.  It will be remembered that in the introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne speaks of the spectre of an ancient minister who haunted it, the rustling of his silken gown was sometimes heard in the hallways.  My friend attributed this passage to something which happened during one of her visits.  She sat one evening with her sister and Hawthorne in the low-studded living-room, and, as was often the case, in silence.  She thought she heard in the entry the rustling of silk, it might have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk.  At the moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was passing through the entry, but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable interval.  “Why, I distinctly heard,” said she, “the rustling of a silk gown in the entry!” The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an explanation, but all was dark and still, no draperies were stirring, no wind whistled, and they returned to their chairs, talking for a moment over the mysterious sound, then relapsing into their former quiet.  Hawthorne meantime sat dreaming, apparently not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after—­when my friend read the Mosses from an Old Manse, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening.  She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne.  During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper.  This paper he often found in the hands of an old man and he was sometimes annoyed because the old man retained it so long.  The old man lived in a suburb and for some reason was equally interested with himself in that paper.  This went on for weeks until one day Hawthorne, entering the room, found the paper as usual in the hands of this man.  Hawthorne sat down and waited patiently as often before until the old man had finished.  After a time the man rose, put on his hat and overcoat, and took his departure.  As the door of the reading-room closed behind him Hawthorne took up the paper which lay in disorder as the man had left it, when, lo and behold, his eye fell in the first column on a notice of the old man’s death.  He was at the moment lying dead in his house in the suburbs and yet Hawthorne had beheld him but a moment before in his usual guise reading the paper in the Athenaeum!  My friend said that Hawthorne told her the story quietly without attempt at explanation and she believed his thought was that he had actually seen a ghost.  The readers of Hawthorne will recall passages which are consonant with the idea that Hawthorne believed in ghosts.