evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in
Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the
high excitement of the prodigious adventure.




XV.

Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see
Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester
Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and
Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;
and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could
not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have
been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.

I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter to
Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
doubly enriched by Hawthorne's keeping. But now if I were to see him at
all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very
modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw