irit at the moment. In the winter he
would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone
upon the frozen lake, with only the shadows of the hills to keep him
company, and sometimes passing the remainder of the night in a solitary
log cabin, whose hearth would blaze with the burning trunks of the
fallen evergreens.

He entered Bowdoin in 1821, and had among his fellow-students Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United
States, and several others who distinguished themselves in later life.
Long afterward Hawthorne recalls his days at Bowdoin as among the
happiest of his life, and in writing to one of his old college friends
speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place, where
he gathered blueberries in study hours; watched the great logs drifting
down from the lumbering districts above along the current of the
Androscoggin, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and
squirrels at odd hours which ought to have been devoted to the classics.

[Illustration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.]

After leaving Bowdoin, Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the
next twelve years of his life, and during which he must have marked out
authorship as his profession, as he attempted nothing else. Here he
produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way
to the periodicals of the day, and which won for him a reputation among
other American writers. But it is remarkable that the years which a man
devotes usually to the best work of his life were spent by Hawthorne in
a contented half-dream of what he meant to accomplish later on; for
exquisite 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 collected later on, and published under the
titles _Twice-Told Tales_ and _Snow Image_. They are full of the grace
and beauty of Hawthorne's style, but in speaking of them Hawthorne
himself says that there is in this result of twelve years little to show
for its thought and industry. But whatever may have been the cause of
delay, the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when
Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance. In
writing this book Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of old
Puritan times in New England, and out of the tarnished records of the
past he created a work of art of marvellous