their situation; they trod the Salem streets as little as possible.
They went to sea, and made long voyages; seamanship became the regular
profession of the family. Hawthorne has said it in charming language.
"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea;
a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the
quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the
hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the
gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also,
in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a
tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings to grow
old and die and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's
grandfather, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his
biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer during the war of
Independence. His father, from whom he was named, was also a
shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise of his
profession. He was carried off by a fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He
left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's
mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock
almost as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by
our author's biographer as a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an
authority whom he quotes, as being "a minute observer of religious
festivals," of "feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the
poor lady in her Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number
to celebrate; but of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed
the usual, and of Sabbaths even more than the usual, proportion.

In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part
of his boyhood, as well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop
has much to say about the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and
about the mystic influences it would project upon such a mind and