of steak," and a "whole warrenful of Welsh rabbits." The "divine spirit
of Humor" was upon him during many of those days at sea, and he revelled
in it like a careless child.

That was a voyage, indeed, long to be remembered, and I shall ever look
back upon it as the most satisfactory "sea turn" I ever happened to
experience. I have sailed many a weary, watery mile since then, but
_Hawthorne_ was not on board!

The summer after his arrival home he spent quietly in Concord, at the
Wayside, and illness in his family made him at times unusually sad. In
one of his notes to me he says:--

"I am continually reminded nowadays of a response which I once heard
a drunken sailor make to a pious gentleman, who asked him how he
felt, 'Pretty d--d miserable, thank God!' It very well expresses my
thorough discomfort and forced acquiescence."

Occasionally he wrote requesting me to make a change, here and there, in
the new edition of his works then passing through the press. On the 23d
of September, 1860, he writes:--

"Please to append the following note to the foot of the page, at the
commencement of the story called 'Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,' in
the 'Twice-Told Tales': 'In an English Review, not long since, I
have been accused of plagiarizing the idea of this story from a
chapter in one of the novels of Alexandra Dumas. There has
undoubtedly been a plagiarism, on one side or the other; but as my
story was written a good deal more than twenty years ago, and as the
novel is of considerably more recent date, I take pleasure in