the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was
fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of
an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond,
near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine. The immense State of Maine,
in the year 1818, must have had an even more magnificently natural
character than it possesses at the present day, and the uncle's
dwelling, in consequence of being in a little smarter style than the
primitive structures that surrounded it, was known by the villagers as
Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop pronounces this region to be of a "weird
and woodsy" character; and Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a
friend as the place where "I first got my cursed habits of solitude."
The outlook, indeed, for an embryonic novelist, would not seem to have
been cheerful; the social dreariness of a small New England community
lost amid the forests of Maine, at the beginning of the present
century, must have been consummate. But for a boy with a relish for
solitude there were many natural resources, and we can understand that
Hawthorne should in after years have spoken very tenderly of this
episode. "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the
freedom I enjoyed." During the long summer days he roamed, gun in
hand, through the great woods, and during the moonlight nights of
winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, "he would
skate until midnight, all alone, upon Sebago Lake, with the deep
shadows of the icy hills on either hand."

In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school, and in the following year
he wrote to his mother, who had remained at Raymond (the boy had found
a home at Salem with another uncle), "I have left school and have
begun to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in
danger of having one learned man in your family.... I get my lessons
at home and recite them to him (Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the