as a man who knows his way. His tread is a light and modest one, but
he keeps the key in his pocket.

His little historical stories all seem to me admirable; they are so
good that you may re-read them many times. They are not numerous, and
they are very short; but they are full of a vivid and delightful sense
of the New England past; they have, moreover, the distinction, little
tales of a dozen and fifteen pages as they are, of being the only
successful attempts at historical fiction that have been made in the
United States. Hawthorne was at home in the early New England history;
he had thumbed its records and he had breathed its air, in whatever
odd receptacles this somewhat pungent compound still lurked. He was
fond of it, and he was proud of it, as any New Englander must be,
measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics who formed
his earliest precursors, in laying the foundations of a mighty empire.
Hungry for the picturesque as he always was, and not finding any very
copious provision of it around him, he turned back into the two
preceding centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive
annals of Massachusetts should at least _appear_ picturesque. His
fancy, which was always alive, played a little with the somewhat
meagre and angular facts of the colonial period and forthwith
converted a great many of them into impressive legends and pictures.
There is a little infusion of colour, a little vagueness about certain
details, but it is very gracefully and discreetly done, and realities
are kept in view sufficiently to make us feel that if we are reading
romance, it is romance that rather supplements than contradicts
history. The early annals of New England were not fertile in legend,
but Hawthorne laid his hands upon everything that would serve his
purpose, and in two or three cases his version of the story has a
great deal of beauty. _The Grey Champion_ is a sketch of less than