certain manuscripts connected with the scheme of an English story. One of
these manuscripts was written in the form of a journalized narrative; the
author merely noting the date of what he wrote, as he went along. The
other was a more extended sketch, of much greater bulk, and without date,
but probably produced several years later. It was not originally intended
by those who at the time had charge of Hawthorne's papers that either of
these incomplete writings should be laid before the public; because they
manifestly had not been left by him in a form which he would have
considered as warranting such a course. But since the second and larger
manuscript has been published under the title of "Dr. Grimshawe's
Secret," it has been thought best to issue the present sketch, so that
the two documents may be examined together. Their appearance places in
the hands of readers the entire process of development leading to the
"Septimius" and "The Dolliver Romance." They speak for themselves much
more efficiently than any commentator can expect to do; and little,
therefore, remains to be said beyond a few words of explanation in regard
to the following pages.

The Note-Books show that the plan of an English romance, turning upon the
fact that an emigrant to America had carried away a family secret which
should give his descendant the power to ruin the family in the mother
country, had occurred to Hawthorne as early as April, 1855. In August of
the same year he visited Smithell's Hall, in Bolton le Moors, concerning
which he had already heard its legend of "The Bloody Footstep," and from
that time on, the idea of this footprint on the threshold-stone of the
ancestral mansion seems to have associated itself inextricably with the
dreamy substance of his yet unshaped romance. Indeed, it leaves its mark
broadly upon Sibyl Dacy's wild legend in "Septimius Felton," and
reappears in the last paragraph of that story. But, so far as we can know
at this day, nothing definite was done until after his departure for