suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more
of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop,
with the sheriff's return of execution upon it, which I found at the
Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the
cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to
have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where
the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant
remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no
need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of
red in my memory.

The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured
to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African
coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed
me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface
to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my
enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in
Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt
the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own
flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady
say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it
seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.
Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his
native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any
place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so
doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the
birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps