might
have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but
it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk. At the
moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was passing through the entry,
but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting
quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable
interval. "Why, I distinctly heard," said she, "the rustling of a silk
gown in the entry!" The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an
explanation, but all was dark and still, no draperies were stirring,
no wind whistled, and they returned to their chairs, talking for a
moment over the mysterious sound, then relapsing into their former
quiet. Hawthorne meantime sat dreaming, apparently not noticing the
light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after--when my
friend read the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, she found that the
incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the
sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said
she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he
often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly
interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found in
the hands of an old man and he was sometimes annoyed because the old
man retained it so long. The old man lived in a suburb and for some
reason was equally interested with himself in that paper. This went on
for weeks until one day Hawthorne, entering the room, found the paper
as usual in the hands of this man. Hawthorne sat down and waited
patiently as often before until the old man had finished. After a time
the man rose, put on his hat and overcoat, and took his departure. As
the door of the reading-room closed behind him Hawthorne took up
the paper which lay in disorder as the man had left it, when, lo and
behold, his eye fell in the first column on a notice of the old man's
death. He was at the moment lying dead in his house in the suburbs and
yet Hawthorne had beheld him but a moment before in his usual guise
reading the paper in the Athenaeum! My friend said that Hawthorne told
her the story quietly without attempt at explanation and she believed
his thought was that he had actually seen a ghost. The readers of
Hawthorne will recall passages which are consonant with the idea that
Hawthorne believed in ghosts.

No other author has affected me quite so profoundly as did Hawthorne.
The period of my develop