ages
near the close. They are descriptive of certain guests at Willard's
Hotel, in Washington, where the travellers lived during their stay at
the Capital.

This portion of Hawthorne's last magazine article recalls forcibly
passages in the first of his published stories, "The Gray Champion."

"It is curious to observe what antiquated figures and costumes
sometimes make their appearance at Willard's. You meet elderly
men with frilled shirt-fronts, for example, the fashion of
which adornment passed away from among the people of this world
half a century ago.

"It is as if one of Stuart's portraits were walking abroad.

"I see no way of accounting for this, except that the troubles
of the times, the impiety of traitors, and the peril of our
sacred Union and Constitution have disturbed in their honored
graves, some of the venerable fathers of the country, and
summoned them forth to protest against the meditated and
half-accomplished sacrilege.

"If it be so, their wonted fires are not altogether
extinguished in their ashes,--in their throats, I might rather
say,--for I beheld one of these excellent old men quaffing such
a horn of Bourbon whiskey as a toper of the present century
would be loath to venture upon.

"But, really, one would be glad to know where these strange
figures come from.

"It shows, at any rate, how many remote, decaying villages and
country neighborhoods of the North, and forest nooks of the
West, and old mansion houses in cities, are shaken by the
tremor of our native soil, so that men long hidden in
retirement put on the garments of their youth and hurry out to
inquire what is the matter.

"The old men whom we see here have generally more marked faces
than the young ones, and naturally enough; since it must be an
extraordinary vigor and venerability of life that can overcome
the rusty sloth of age, and keep the senior flexible enough to
take an interest in new things; whereas, hundreds of
commonplace young men come hither to stare with eyes of vacant
wonder, and with vague hopes of finding out what they are fit
for. And this war (we may say so much in its favor) has been
the means of discovering that important secret to not a few."

* * * * *

The writer remembers the vivid and untiring pleas