that in _The House of the Seven Gables_, the only one of his novels of
which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed himself of
the opportunity to give a description of it. He had of course a filial
fondness for it--a deep-seated sense of connection with it; but he
must have spent some very dreary years there, and the two feelings,
the mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in the Introduction to
_The Scarlet Letter_.

"The old town of Salem," he writes,--"my native place,
though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and
in maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my
affections, the force of which I have never realized during
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as the
physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried
surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of
which pretend to architectural beauty; its irregularity,
which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its
long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole
extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at
one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other--such
being the features of my native town it would be quite as
reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
chequer-board."

But he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense
of intensely belonging to it--that the spell of the continuity of his
life with that of his predecessors has never been broken. "It is no
matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old
wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site and
sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chilliest of social