One very odd but characteristic notion of his, when a youth, was, that he should like a competent income which should neither increase nor diminish, for then, he said, it would not engross too much of his attention.  Surrey’s little poem, “The Means to obtain a Happy Life,” expressed exactly what his idea of happiness was when a lad.  When a school-boy he wrote verses for the newspapers, but he ignored their existence in after years with a smile of droll disgust.  One of his quatrains lives in the memory of a friend, who repeated it to me recently:—­

    “The ocean hath its silent caves,
       Deep, quiet, and alone;
     Above them there are troubled waves,
       Beneath them there are none.”

When the Atlantic Cable was first laid, somebody, not knowing the author of the lines, quoted them to Hawthorne as applicable to the calmness said to exist in the depths of the ocean.  He listened to the verse, and then laughingly observed, “I know something of the deep sea myself.”

In 1836 he went to Boston, I am told, to edit the “American Magazine of Useful Knowledge,” for which he was to be paid a salary of six hundred dollars a year.  The proprietors soon became insolvent, so that he received nothing, but he kept on just the same as if he had been paid regularly.  The plan of the work proposed by the publishers of the magazine admitted no fiction into its pages.  The magazine was printed on coarse paper and was illustrated by engravings painful to look at.  There were no contributors except the editor, and he wrote the whole of every number.  Short biographical sketches of eminent men and historical narratives filled up its pages.  I have examined the columns of this deceased magazine, and read Hawthorne’s narrative of Mrs. Dustan’s captivity.  Mrs. Dustan was carried off by the Indians from Haverhill, and Hawthorne does not much commiserate the hardships she endured, but reserves his sympathy for her husband, who was not carried into captivity, and suffered nothing from the Indians, but who, he says, was a tenderhearted man, and took care of the children during Mrs. D.’s absence from home, and probably knew that his wife would be more than a match for a whole tribe of savages.

When the Rev. Mr. Cheever was knocked down and flogged in the streets of Salem and then imprisoned, Hawthorne came out of his retreat and visited him regularly in jail, showing strong sympathy for the man and great indignation for those who had maltreated him.

Those early days in Salem,—­how interesting the memory of them must be to the friends who knew and followed the gentle dreamer in his budding career!  When the whisper first came to the timid boy, in that “dismal chamber in Union Street,” that he too possessed the soul of an artist, there were not many about him to share the divine rapture that must have filled his proud young heart.  Outside of his own little family circle, doubting and desponding