tongue could tell, and he said, if five lives were vouchsafed to him, he could employ them all in writing stories out of those books.  He had sketched, in his mind, several romances founded on the remarkable trials reported in the ancient volumes; and one day, I remember, he made my blood tingle by relating some of the situations he intended, if his life was spared, to weave into future romances.  Sir Walter Scott’s novels he continued almost to worship, and was accustomed to read them aloud in his family.  The novels of G.P.R.  James, both the early and the later ones, he insisted were admirable stories, admirably told, and he had high praise to bestow on the works of Anthony Trollope.  “Have you ever read these novels?” he wrote to me in a letter from England, some time before Trollope began to be much known in America.  “They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of.  And these books are as English as a beefsteak.  Have they ever been tried in America?  It needs an English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should think that the human nature in them would give them success anywhere.”

I have often been asked if all his moods were sombre, and if he was never jolly sometimes like other people.  Indeed he was; and although the humorous side of Hawthorne was not easily or often discoverable, yet have I seen him marvellously moved to fun, and no man laughed more heartily in his way over a good story.  Wise and witty H——­, in whom wisdom and wit are so ingrained that age only increases his subtile spirit, and greatly enhances the power of his cheerful temperament, always had the talismanic faculty of breaking up that thoughtfully sad face into mirthful waves; and I remember how Hawthorne writhed with hilarious delight over Professor L——­’s account of a butcher who remarked that “Idees had got afloat in the public mind with respect to sassingers.”  I once told him of a young woman who brought in a manuscript, and said, as she placed it in my hands, “I don’t know what to do with myself sometimes, I’m so filled with mammoth thoughts.”  A series of convulsive efforts to suppress explosive laughter followed, which I remember to this day.

He had an inexhaustible store of amusing anecdotes to relate of people and things he had observed on the road.  One day he described to me, in his inimitable and quietly ludicrous manner, being watched, while on a visit to a distant city, by a friend who called, and thought he needed a protector, his health being at that time not so good as usual.  “He stuck by me,” said Hawthorne, “as if he were afraid to leave me alone; he stayed past the dinner hour, and when I began to wonder if he never took meals himself, he departed and set another man to watch me till he should return.  That man watched me so, in his unwearying kindness, that when I left the house I forgot half my luggage, and left behind, among other things, a beautiful pair of slippers.  They watched me so, among them, I swear to you I forgot nearly everything I owned.”