would prove to be a version of my relations, and my own life. I think
one copy passed from hand to hand, but the interest in it soon blew
over, and I have not been noticed there since.

"Two Men" I began as I did the others, with a single motive; the
shadow of a man passed before me, and I built a visionary fabric round
him. I have never tried to girdle the earth; my limits are narrow; the
modern novel, as Andrew Lang lately calls it,--with its love-making,
disquisition, description, history, theology, ethics,--I have
no sprinkling of. My last novel, "Temple House," was personally
conducted, so far that I went to Plymouth to find a suitable abode for
my hero, Angus Gates, and to measure with my eye the distance between
the bar in the bay and the shore, the scene of a famous wreck before
the Revolution. As my stories and novels were never in touch with my
actual life, they seem now as if they were written by a ghost of
their time. It is to strangers from strange places that I owe the most
sympathetic recognition. Some have come to me, and from many I have
had letters that warmed my heart, and cheered my mind. Beside the name
of Mr. Lowell, I mention two New England names, to spare me the
fate of the prophet of the Gospel, the late Maria Louise Pool, whose
lamentable death came far too early, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who
lived to read "The Morgesons" only, and to write me a characteristic
letter. With some slight criticism, he wrote, "Pray pardon my
frankness, for what is the use of saying anything, unless we say what
we think?... Otherwise it seemed to me as genuine and lifelike as
anything that pen and ink can do. There are very few books of which
I take the trouble to have any opinion at all, or of which I
could retain any memory so long after reading them as I do of 'The
Morgesons.'"