a practical or practicable man. He has laws to obey not at all the
less stringent because men of a different temperament refuse to
acknowledge them, and he is held to a loyalty quite beyond their
conception.

So Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick were as pleasant figures to our
author in the picture of life as any others. He went daily upon the
vessels, looked and listened and learned, was a favorite of the
sailors as such men always are, did his work faithfully, and, having
dreamed his dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the
Old Manse and a new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most
delightful little nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion
to a scholar". Of the three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the
_Mosses_ is the most perfect history, and of the quality of those
years the _Mosses_ themselves are sufficient proof. They were mostly
written in the little study, and originally published in the
_Democratic Review_, then edited by Hawthorne's friend O'Sullivan.

To the inhabitants of Concord, however, our author was as much a
phantom and a fable as the old pastor of the parish, dead half a
century before, and whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually
rejoining its original in native dust. The gate, fallen from its
hinges in a remote antiquity, was never rehung. "The wheel-track
leading to the door" remained still overgrown with grass. No bold
villager ever invaded the sleep of "the glimmering shadows" in the
avenue. At evening no lights gleamed from the windows. Scarce once in
many months did the single old knobby-faced coachman at the railroad
bring a fare to "Mr. Hawthorne's". "_Is_ there anybody in the old
house?" sobbed the old ladies in despair, imbibing tea of a livid
green. That knocker, which everybody had enjoyed the right of lifting