Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy.
But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage,
likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's
liquor-bar) where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because,
striking though it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping
with the rest of the fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit
upon such a simile, would have had conscience and self-denial enough,
not to mention fine enough artistic sense, to delete it!

The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way;
but, as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his
creative moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must
have destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for
none such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen
the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was
destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time no
notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that
would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant
manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations;
page after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have
taught himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series
of his longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say
at a first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the
work of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in
solitude either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and
down the floor of his study. It was this habit which created the
pathway along the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in
Concord; it was a deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil,
hardly nine inches wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in
length. The monotonous movement of walking seemed to put his mind in