iend, he
speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place
when he gathered blueberries in study hours, watched the great
logs drifting down the current of the Androscoggin from the lumber
districts above, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and
squirrels in hours which should have been devoted to the classics.

In this same letter, which forms the dedication to one of his books,
he adds that it is this friend, if any one, who is responsible for
his becoming a writer, as it was here, in the shadow of the tall pines
which sheltered Bowdoin College, that the first prophecy concerning
his destiny was made. He was to be a writer of fiction, the friend
said, little dreaming of the honors that were to crown one of the
great novelists of the world.

After leaving Bowdoin Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the
next twelve years of his life. Here he produced, from time to time,
stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals and won
for him a narrow reputation. But the years which a man usually devotes
to his best work were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of
a great future, for good as is some of the work produced at this time,
it never would have won for the author the highest place in American
literature. These stories and sketches were afterward collected and
published under the title _Twice-Told Tales_ and _The Snow Image_.
Full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, they were the best
imaginative work yet produced in America, but in speaking of them
Hawthorne himself says that in this result of twelve years there is
little to show for its thought and industry.

But the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when
Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance.
Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of Puritan times in
New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created
a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty. In the days of
which he wrote, a Puritan town was exactly like a large family bound
together by mutual interests, the acts of each life being regarded as
affecting the whole community. Hawthorne has preserved this spirit of
colonial New England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears, and
the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only
in public records and church histories, was given new life. In
Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of