through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had
hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with
all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting
that they were made a show of. And these books are as English as a
beefsteak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an English
residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should
think that the human nature in them would give them success anywhere."

I have often been asked if all his moods were sombre, and if he was
never jolly sometimes like other people. Indeed he was; and although the
humorous side of Hawthorne was not easily or often discoverable, yet
have I seen him marvellously moved to fun, and no man laughed more
heartily in his way over a good story. Wise and witty H----, in whom
wisdom and wit are so ingrained that age only increases his subtile
spirit, and greatly enhances the power of his cheerful temperament,
always had the talismanic faculty of breaking up that thoughtfully sad
face into mirthful waves; and I remember how Hawthorne writhed with
hilarious delight over Professor L----'s account of a butcher who
remarked that "Idees had got afloat in the public mind with respect to
sassingers." I once told him of a young woman who brought in a
manuscript, and said, as she placed it in my hands, "I don't know what
to do with myself sometimes, I'm so filled with _mammoth thoughts_." A
series of convulsive efforts to suppress explosive laughter followed,
which I remember to this day.

He had an inexhaustible store of amusing anecdotes to relate of people
and things he had observed on the road. One day he described to me, in
his inimitable and quietly ludicrous manner, being _watched_, while on a
visit to a distant city, by a friend who called, and thought he needed a
protector, his health being at that time not so good as usual. "He stuck