ow,
when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of
them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed
near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me
standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the
afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we
talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods,
and about the crows whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the
experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the
character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the
sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and
about other matters of high and low philosophy."

Nothing that Hawthorne has ever written of Concord is more to be
cherished to-day than this description of a happy afternoon passed by
him in Sleepy Hollow talking with Margaret Fuller of "matters of high
and low philosophy." For there are few parts of Concord to which
visitors go more religiously than to the still old cemetery, where on
the hill by Ridge Path Hawthorne himself now sleeps quietly, with the
grave of Thoreau just behind him, and the grave of Emerson, his
philosopher-friend, on the opposite side of the way. A great pine stands
at the head of Hawthorne's last resting-place, and a huge unhewn block
of pink marble is his formal monument.

Yet the Old Manse will, so long as it stands, be the romancer's most
intimate relic, for it was here that he lived as a happy bridegroom, and
here that his first child was born. And from this ancient dwelling it
was that he drew the inspiration for what is perhaps the most curious
book of tales in all American literature, a book of which another
American master of prose[13] has said, "Hawthorne here did for our past
what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country; another Wizard
of the North, he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty
materials of history, and summoned the great dead again to live and move
among us."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: "Historic Towns of New England." G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote 13: Henry James.]

SALEM'S CHINESE GOD

Of the romantic figures which grace the history of New England in the
nineteenth century, none is to be compared in dash and in all those
other qualities that captivate the imagination with the figure of
Frederick Townsend Ward, the Salem boy who won a generalship