THE SNOW-IMAGE

AND

OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES



THE WIVES OF THE DEAD

By

Nathaniel Hawthorne



The following story, the simple and domestic incidents of which may be
deemed scarcely worth relating, after such a lapse of time, awakened some
degree of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport of the
Bay Province. The rainy twilight of an autumn day,--a parlor on the
second floor of a small house, plainly furnished, as beseemed the
middling circumstances of its inhabitants, yet decorated with little
curiosities from beyond the sea, and a few delicate specimens of Indian
manufacture,--these are the only particulars to be premised in regard to
scene and season. Two young and comely women sat together by the
fireside, nursing their mutual and peculiar sorrows. They were the
recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman, and two
successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances
of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic. The universal sympathy
excited by this bereavement drew numerous condoling guests to the