as contented across the water as he was in Concord.  I remember walking with him to the Old Manse, a mile or so distant from The Wayside, his new residence, and talking over England and his proposed absence of several years.  We strolled round the house, where he spent the first years of his married life, and he pointed from the outside to the windows, out of which he had looked and seen supernatural and other visions.  We walked up and down the avenue, the memory of which he has embalmed in the “Mosses,” and he discoursed most pleasantly of all that had befallen him since he led a lonely, secluded life in Salem.  It was a sleepy, warm afternoon, and he proposed that we should wander up the banks of the river and lie down and watch the clouds float above and in the quiet stream.  I recall his lounging, easy air as he tolled me along until we came to a spot secluded, and ofttimes sacred to his wayward thoughts.  He bade me lie down on the grass and hear the birds sing.  As we steeped ourselves in the delicious idleness, he began to murmur some half-forgotten lines from Thomson’s “Seasons,” which he said had been favorites of his from boyhood.  While we lay there, hidden in the grass, we heard approaching footsteps, and Hawthorne hurriedly whispered, “Duck! or we shall be interrupted by somebody.”  The solemnity of his manner, and the thought of the down-flat position in which we had both placed ourselves to avoid being seen, threw me into a foolish, semi-hysterical fit of laughter, and when he nudged me, and again whispered more lugubriously than ever, “Heaven help me, Mr. ——­ is close upon us!” I felt convinced that if the thing went further, suffocation, in my case at least, must ensue.

He kept me constantly informed, after he went to Liverpool, of how he was passing his time; and his charming “English Note-Books” reveal the fact that he was never idle.  There were touches, however, in his private letters which escaped daily record in his journal, and I remember how delightful it was, after he landed in Europe, to get his frequent missives.  In one of the first he gives me an account of a dinner where he was obliged to make a speech.  He says:—­

“I tickled up John Bull’s self-conceit (which is very easily done) with a few sentences of most outrageous flattery, and sat down in a general puddle of good feeling.”  In another he says:  “I have taken a house in Rock Park, on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, and am as snug as a bug in a rug.  Next year you must come and see how I live.  Give my regards to everybody, and my love to half a dozen....  I wish you would call on Mr. Savage, the antiquarian, if you know him, and ask whether he can inform me what part of England the original William Hawthorne came from.  He came over, I think in 1634....  It would really be a great obligation if he could answer the above query.  Or, if the fact is not within his own knowledge, he might perhaps indicate some place where such information might be