the only military service of my life was as a private soldier in a
college company, of which Pierce was one of the officers. He entered
into this latter business, or pastime, with an earnestness with which I
could not pretend to compete, and at which, perhaps, he would now be
inclined to smile." But much more intimate and delightful is the
reminiscence which, in the dedicatory preface of "The Snow Image,"
addressed to his friend Bridge, he thus calls up. "If anybody is
responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know
not whence your faith came: but, while we were lads together at a
country college, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall
academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the
current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in
the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching treats in
that shadowy little stream, which, I suppose, is still wandering
riverward through the forest,--though you and I will never cast a line
in it again,--two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to
acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard
of, or else it had been the worse for us,--still it was your prognostic
of your friend's destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction." I have
asked Mr. Bridge what gave him this impression of Hawthorne, and he
tells me that it was an indescribable conviction, aroused by the whole
drift of his friend's mind as he saw it. Exquisite indeed must have been
that first fleeting aroma of genius; and I would that it might have been
then and there imprisoned and perpetuated for our delight. But we must
be satisfied with the quick and sympathetic insight with which
Hawthorne's friend discovered his true bent. The world owes more,
probably, to this early encouragement from a college companion than it
can ever estimate.

Nothing in human intercourse, I think, has a more peculiar and