“(The author is pained to learn that, in selecting a name for the fictitious inhabitants of a castle in the air, he has wounded the feelings of more than one respectable descendant of an old Pyncheon family.  He begs leave to say that he intended no reference to any individual of the name, now or heretofore extant; and further, that, at the time of writing his book, he was wholly unaware of the existence of such a family in New England for two hundred years back, and that whatever he may have since learned of them is altogether to their credit.)

    “Insert it or not, as you like.  I have done with the matter.”

I advised him to let the Pyncheons rest as they were, and omit any addition, either as note or preface, to the romance.

Near the close of 1851 his health seemed unsettled, and he asked me to look over certain proofs “carefully,” for he did not feel well enough to manage them himself.  In one of his notes, written from Lenox at that time, he says:—­

“Please God, I mean to look you in the face towards the end of next week; at all events, within ten days.  I have stayed here too long and too constantly.  To tell you a secret, I am sick to death of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here.  But I must.  The air and climate do not agree with my health at all; and, for the first time since I was a boy, I have felt languid and dispirited during almost my whole residence here.  O that Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a rood or two of garden-ground, near the sea-coast.  I thank you for the two volumes of De Quincey.  If it were not for your kindness in supplying me with books now and then, I should quite forget how to read.”

Hawthorne was a hearty devourer of books, and in certain moods of mind it made very little difference what the volume before him happened to be.  An old play or an old newspaper sometimes gave him wondrous great content, and he would ponder the sleepy, uninteresting sentences as if they contained immortal mental aliment.  He once told me he found such delight in old advertisements in the newspapers at the Boston Athenaeum, that he had passed delicious hours among them.  At other times he was very fastidious, and threw aside book after book until he found the right one.  De Quincey was a special favorite with him, and the Sermons of Laurence Sterne he once commended to me as the best sermons ever written.  In his library was an early copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia,” which had floated down to him from a remote ancestry, and which he had read so industriously for forty years that it was nearly worn out of its thick leathern cover.  Hearing him say once that the old English State Trials were enchanting reading, and knowing that he did not possess a copy of those heavy folios, I picked up a set one day in a bookshop and sent them to him.  He often told me that he spent more hours over them and got more delectation out of them than