know as Dr. K---- will." He adds that it is now four weeks since he has
been to school, "and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer."
This weighing of possibilities, and this sense of the uncertain future,
already quaintly show the disposition of the man he is to grow into;
though the writing is as characterless as extreme youth, exaggerated
distinctness, and copy-books could make it. The little invalid has not
yet quite succumbed, however, for the same letter details that he has
hopped out into the street once since his lameness began, and been "out
in the office and had four cakes." But the trouble was destined to last
much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was
some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that
he became quite well. Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester (at
whose sessions it may have been that Hawthorne read Enfield's "Speaker,"
the name of which had "a classical sound in his ears," long, long
afterward, when he saw the author's tombstone in Liverpool), came to
hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after
this in Hawthorne's boyish history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary
still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing
on the fly-leaf the legend: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., with the
respects of J. E. Worcester." For a long time, in the worst of his
lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the
floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely
fond of cats,--a taste which he kept through life; and during this
illness, forced to odd resorts for amusement, he knitted a pair of
stockings for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When
tired of reading, he diverted himself with constructing houses of books
for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps
erecting triumphal arches for her to pass under. In this period he must
have taken a considerable range in literature, for his age; and one
would almost say that Nature, seeing so rare a spirit in a sound body