and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the
wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a
dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes
shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight; they would not
depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and
feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!" Susan, the imaginary wife
in "The Village Uncle," is said to have had a prototype in the daughter
of a Salem fisherman, whose wit and charm gave Hawthorne frequent
amusement; and I suppose that not seldom he reaped delightful
suggestions from his meetings with frank, unconscious, and individual
people of tastes and life unlike his own. I have heard it told with a
polite, self-satisfied scorn, that he was in the habit of visiting now
and then a tavern patronized by 'longshore-men and nautical veterans, to
listen to their talk. I can well believe it, for it is this sort of
intercourse that a person of manly genius, with a republican
fellow-feeling for the unrenowned, most covets. How well he gives the
tone of these old sea-dogs, when he writes: "The blast will put in its
word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them!" It
was this constant searching among the common types of men, and his ready
sympathy with them, refined as it was hearty, that stored his mind with
a variety of accurate impressions which afterward surprised observers,
in a man of habits so retired.

His uncles, the Mannings, were connected with extensive stage-coach
lines at this time, and Hawthorne seems to have used these as antennae
to bring himself in contact with new and nutritive regions and people. A
letter, probably written in 1830, which I do not feel at liberty to
quote entire, tells something of a trip that he took with Samuel Manning
through a part of Connecticut and the Connecticut valley. The extracts
that follow give a glimpse of the fresh and alert interest he felt about