writing, though presumably but one of pronouncing it,--and called
himself Hathorne. It was not long after the birth of his only boy,
second of his three children, however, that he left the name to this
male successor, with whom it underwent a restoration to the more
picturesque and flowered form of Hawthorne. Nathaniel, the son of
Daniel, died in Surinam, in the spring of 1808, of a fever, it is
thought, and left his widow stricken with a lifelong grief, his family
suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow and solitude. I think I cannot convey
the sadness of this more fully than by simply saying it. Yet sombre as
the event is, it seems a fit overture to the opening life of this spirit
so nobly sad whom we are about to study. The tradition seems to have
become established that Captain Nathaniel was inclined to melancholy,
and very reticent; also, that though he was an admirable shipmaster, he
had a vigorous appetite for reading, and carried many books with him on
his long voyages. Those who know the inheritances that come with the
Puritan blood will easily understand the sort of dark, underlying
deposit of unutterable sadness that often reminds such persons of their
austere ancestry; but, in addition to this, the Hathornes had now firmly
imbibed the belief that their family was under a retributive ban for its
share in the awful severities of the Quaker and the witchcraft periods.
It was not to them the symbolic and picturesque thing that it is to us,
but a real overhanging, intermittent oppressiveness, that must often
have struck across their actions in a chilling and disastrous way. Their
ingrained reticence was in itself, when contrasted with Major Hathorne's
fame in oratory, a sort of corroboration of the idea that fate was
making reprisals upon them. The captain's children felt this; and the
son, when grown to manhood, was said to greatly resemble his father in
appearance, as well. Of the Endicotts, who also figured largely in the
maritime history of Salem, it is told that in the West Indies the name
grew so familiar as being that of the captain of a vessel, that it