youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
retreat from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I
went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had
moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go
back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note,
and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither,
and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But
at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day
with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to
Hawthorne, and let, him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the
kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down
by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for
the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage,
and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with
him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,
and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there
could be none in this.

But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields,
to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me
about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a
humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and
laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He
perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I
could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable
moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,