became generic; and when a new ship arrived, the natives would ask, "Who
is the Endicott?" Very likely the Hathornes had as fixed a fame in the
ports where they traded. At all events, some forty years after the
captain's death at Surinam, a sailor one day stopped Mr. Surveyor
Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem Custom House, and asked him if he
had not once a relative--an uncle or a father--who died in Surinam at
the date given above. He had recognized him by his likeness to the
father, of whom Nathaniel probably had no memory at all.

But he inherited much from his mother, too. She has been described by a
gentleman who saw her in Maine, as very reserved, "a very pious woman,
and a very minute observer of religious festivals," of "feasts, fasts,
new moons, and Sabbaths," and perhaps a little inclined to superstition.
Such an influence as hers would inevitably foster in the son that strain
of reverence, and that especial purity and holiness of thought, which
pervade all that he has written. Those who knew her have said also, that
the luminous, gray, magnificent eyes that so impressed people in
Hawthorne were like hers. She had been Miss Elizabeth Clarke Manning,
the daughter of Richard Manning, whose ancestors came to New England
about 1680, and sister of Richard and of Robert Manning, a well-known
pomologist of the same place. After the death of her husband, this
brother Robert came to her assistance, Captain Hathorne having left but
little property: he was only thirty-two when he died.

Nathaniel had been born in a solid, old-fashioned little house on Union
Street, which very appropriately faced the old shipyard of the town in
1760; and it appears that in the year before his birth, the Custom House
of that time had been removed to a spot "opposite the long brick
building owned by W. S. Gray, and Benjamin H. Hathorne,"--as if the
future Surveyor's association with the revenue were already drawing