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Hawthorne is still looking at me in his far-seeing way, as if he were pondering what was next to be said about him.  It would not displease him, I know, if I were to begin my discursive talk to-day by telling a little incident connected with a famous American poem.

Hawthorne dined one day with Longfellow, and brought with him a friend from Salem.  After dinner the friend said:  “I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story, based upon a legend of Acadie, and still current there; a legend of a girl who, in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him dying in a hospital, when both were old.”  Longfellow wondered that this legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and said to him:  “If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem?” To this Hawthorne assented, and moreover promised not to treat the subject in prose till Longfellow had seen what he could do with it in verse.  And so we have “Evangeline” in beautiful hexameters, —­a poem that will hold its place in literature while true affection lasts.  Hawthorne rejoiced in this great success of Longfellow, and loved to count up the editions, both foreign and American, of this now world-renowned poem.

I have lately met an early friend of Hawthorne’s, older than himself, who knew him intimately all his life long, and I have learned some additional facts about his youthful days.  Soon after he left college he wrote some stories which he called “Seven Tales of my Native Land.”  The motto which he chose for the title-page was “We are Seven,” from Wordsworth.  My informant read the tales in manuscript, and says some of them were very striking, particularly one or two Witch Stories.  As soon as the little book was well prepared for the press he deliberately threw it into the fire, and sat by to see its destruction.

When about fourteen he wrote out for a member of his family a list of the books he had at that time been reading.  The catalogue was a long one, but my informant remembers that The Waverley Novels, Rousseau’s Works, and The Newgate Calender were among them.  Serious remonstrances were made by the family touching the perusal of this last work, but he persisted in going through it to the end.  He had an objection in his boyhood to reading much that was called “true and useful.”  Of history in general he was not very fond, but he read Froissart with interest, and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion.  He is remembered to have said at that time “he cared very little for the history of the world before the fourteenth century.”  After he left college he read a great deal of French literature, especially the works of Voltaire and his contemporaries.  He rarely went into the streets during the daytime, unless there was to be a gathering of the people for some public purpose, such as a political meeting,