have been considerably taxed in devising a proper explanation of the
circumstance. At any rate, the Democrats gave him a small post in the
Boston Custom-house, to which an annual salary of $1,200 was attached,
and Hawthorne appears at first to have joyously welcomed the gift. The
duties of the office were not very congruous to the genius of a man of
fancy; but it had the advantage that it broke the spell of his cursed
solitude, as he called it, drew him away from Salem, and threw him,
comparatively speaking, into the world. The first volume of the
American Note-Books contains some extracts from letters written during
his tenure of this modest office, which indicate sufficiently that his
occupations cannot have been intrinsically gratifying.

"I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during the
winter of 1840, "on board of a black little British
schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city.
Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for
the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the dock as
if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel
lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful
prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts
and timbers, half immersed in the water and covered with
ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had
left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles.
Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off,
appeared the Bunker's Hill Monument, and what interested me
considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a
clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of
the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little
cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove,
among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and