landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it improbable that
he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books contain but few
comments upon the routine of life of the community; his letters to his
wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can trace several
of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the romance. The
episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the scene of
the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably close
reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years before,
Hawthorne had been an actor.

The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the
hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox;
there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the
stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the
glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a
passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the
groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and
battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a
thin face and a red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half
drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a
stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody but fixing his one moist
eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in
decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling
into decay, he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot
where he was murdered. The word ragamuffin," he adds, with
characteristic determination to be exact, "does not accurately express
the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of
respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind of dignity
in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle
correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old