innumerable lumber of all sorts--my olfactories meanwhile
being greatly refreshed with the odour of a pipe, which the
captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last
came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light
upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the
signal of my release."

A worse man than Hawthorne would have measured coal quite as well, and
of all the dismal tasks to which an unremunerated imagination has ever
had to accommodate itself, I remember none more sordid than the
business depicted in the foregoing lines. "I pray," he writes some
weeks later, "that in one year more I may find some way of escaping
from this unblest Custom-house; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I
do detest all offices; all, at least, that are held on a political
tenure, and I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither
away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to
india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that and which will
stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my
Custom-house experience--to know a politician. It is a knowledge which
no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me; because
the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." A few days later
he goes on in the same strain:--

"I do not think it is the doom laid upon me of murdering so
many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-house
that makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again
trying to write worthily ... yet with a sense as if all the
noblest part of man had been left out of my composition, or
had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own
keeping.... Never comes any bird of Paradise into that