MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

THE OLD MANSE.


The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.


Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself
having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the
gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of
black-ash trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral
procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned
from that gateway towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track
leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was
almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or
three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to
pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half
asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a
kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite
the aspect of belonging to the material world. Certainly it had
little in common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent
upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were,
into the domestic circle. From these quiet windows the figures of
passing travellers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of
privacy. In its near retirement and accessible seclusion, it was the
very spot for the residence of a clergyman,--a man not estranged from
human life, yet enveloped, in the midst of it, with a veil woven of