ladies and melancholy sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate
the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An
eighteen-months' work--We leave five cats behind.

Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy
and lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at
Portsmouth. He had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of
his other friends had since their graduating days, and he had been
from the first a believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The
Scarlet Letter shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his
triumphant "I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard.
And when my father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to
live in, it was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He
stipulated that the place should be somewhere along the New England
sea-coast.

Had this wish of his been fulfilled it might have made great
differences. Hawthorne had always dwelt within sight and sound of the
Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the
Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his
complete well-being. At this juncture physical health had for the
first time become an object to him; he was run down by a year of
suffering and hard work, and needed nature's kindest offices. A
suitable house of his own by the sea-side would probably have brought
him up to his best physical condition to begin with, and kept him so;
and it would so have endeared itself to him that when, two or three
years later, Pierce had offered him a foreign appointment he might
have been moved to decline it, and have gone on writing American
romances to the end--to the advantage of American letters. Concord had
its own attractions; but it never held him as the sea would have done,