exasperated, recalled the manuscript. Andrews, waiting only for better
business prospects, was loath to let them go; but Hawthorne insisted,
and at last the publisher sent word, "Mr. Hawthorne's manuscript awaits
his orders." The writer received it and burned it, to the chagrin of
Andrews, who had hoped to bring out many works by the same hand.

This, at the time, must have been an incident of incalculable and
depressing importance to Hawthorne, and the intense emotion it caused
may be guessed from the utterances of the young writer in the sketch
just alluded to, though he has there veiled the affair in a light film
of sarcasm. The hero of that scene is called Oberon, one of the feigned
names which Hawthorne himself used at times in contributing to
periodicals. "'What is more potent than fire!' said he, in his gloomiest
tone. 'Even thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape
it.... All that I had accomplished, all that I planned for future years,
has perished by one common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The
deed has been my fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life; a
long repentance of this hour; and at last an obscure grave, where they
will bury and forget me!'" There is also an allusion to the tales
founded on witchcraft: "I could believe, if I chose," says Oberon, "that
there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have read them, and
know what I mean,--that conception in which I endeavored to embody the
character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written
records of witchcraft. O, I have a horror of what was created in my own
brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a
sort of material existence!' You remember how the hellish thing used to
suck away the happiness of those who ... subjected themselves to his
power." This is curious, as showing the point from which Hawthorne had
resolved to treat the theme. He had instinctively perceived that the
only way to make the witchcraft delusion available in fiction was to