ker's liquor-bar)
where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though
it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the
fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile,
would have had conscience and self-denial enough, not to mention fine
enough artistic sense, to delete it!

The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way; but,
as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his creative
moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must have
destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for none
such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen
the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was
destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time
no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that
would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant
manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations; page
after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have taught
himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series of his
longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say at a
first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the work
of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in solitude
either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and down the
floor of his study. It was this habit which created the pathway along
the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in Concord; it was a
deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil, hardly nine inches
wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in length. The monotonous
movement of walking seemed to put his mind in the receptive state
favorable for hearing the voices of imagination. The external faculties
were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted, and he was able to peruse
the vision beyond.

[MAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS]

But there is an important exception to this rule to be noted in the
matter of his fictitious narratives which were posthumously published.
These, as I have elsewhere said, are all concerned with a single
theme--the never-dying man. There are two complete versions of
Septimius, of about equal length, and many passages in the two are
identical. There is a short sketch on somewhat different lines, called
(by the editor) The Bloody Footstep; and there is still another, and
a