at an entertainment given by Sir William Howe, the last of
the Royal Governors, during the siege of Boston by Washington), that
"superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the
wondrous tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture
the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide
through the Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in
a military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping
his iron-shod boots upon the freestone steps, with a semblance of
feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp." Hawthorne
had, as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that
faculty which is called now-a-days the historic consciousness. He
never sought to exhibit it on a large scale; he exhibited it indeed on
a scale so minute that we must not linger too much upon it. His vision
of the past was filled with definite images--images none the less
definite that they were concerned with events as shadowy as this
dramatic passing away of the last of King George's representatives in
his long loyal but finally alienated colony.

I have said that Hawthorne had become engaged in about his
thirty-fifth-year; but he was not married until 1842. Before this
event took place he passed through two episodes which (putting his
falling in love aside) were much the most important things that had
yet happened to him. They interrupted the painful monotony of his
life, and brought the affairs of men within his personal experience.
One of these was moreover in itself a curious and interesting chapter
of observation, and it fructified, in Hawthorne's memory, in one of
his best productions. How urgently he needed at this time to be drawn
within the circle of social accidents, a little anecdote related by
Mr. Lathrop in connection with his first acquaintance with the young
lady he was to marry, may serve as an example. This young lady became
known to him through her sister, who had first approached him as an
admirer of the _Twice-Told Tales_ (as to the authorship of which she
had been so much in the dark as to have attributed it first,
conjecturally, to one of the two Miss Hathornes); and the two Miss
Peabodys, desiring to see more of the charming writer, caused him to
be invited to a species of _conversazione_ at the house of one of
their friends, at which they themselves took care to be punctual.
Several other ladies, however, were as punctual as they, and