himself, who was plainly the centre of interest there, fell into the
common ways of isolation. "He had little communication," writes Mr.
Lathrop, "with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were
brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four
inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never
read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters, as might be imagined
from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his
new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he
sometimes read older literature to them. It was the custom in this
household for the several members to remain very much by themselves; the
three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself; and,
speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said,
'We do not even _live_ at our house!'" He seldom went out by day,
unless for long excursions in the country; an early sea bath on summer
mornings and a dark walk after supper, longer in the warm weather,
shorter in the winter season, were habitual, and a bowl of thick
chocolate with bread crumbed into it, or a plate of fruit, on his return
prepared him for the night's work. Study in the morning, composition in
the afternoon, and reading in the evening, are described as his routine,
but it is unlikely that any such regularity ruled where times and
seasons were so much at his own command. He had no visitors and made no
friends; hardly twenty persons in the town, he thought, were aware of
his existence; but he brought home hundreds of volumes from the Salem
Athenaeum, and knew the paths of the woods and pastures and the way
along the beaches and rocky points, and he had the stuff of his fantasy
with which to occupy himself when nature and books failed to satisfy
him. At first there must have been great pleasure in being at home, for
he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and
he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer
and his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the