which I moved and dealt There must follow a corresponding modification
in the character of the narrative; yet that, after all is superficial,
too. For the memory of my father has always been with me, and has
doubtless influenced me more than I am myself aware. And certainly but
for him this book would never have been attempted.



I



Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My
mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of
imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile
indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on
Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted
mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr.
Pickwick--My father in l850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink
butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second
floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my
aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of
the age.

My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned
woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the
aid of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on
the walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach
me all the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed
according to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish