able environment for the handsome, imaginative boy who was to
create the most beautiful literary art that America had yet known.
Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with memories
of the witches hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the
sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves and warehouses held
priceless stores of merchandise. Between this haunting spirit of the
past and the broader, newer life of the future, Hawthorne walked
with the serene hope of the youth of that day. The old, intolerant
Puritanism had passed away. Only the fine gold remained as the
priceless treasure of the new generation.

Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town.
He went to school and to church, loved the sea and prophesied that he
should go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading,
and ready to fight with any school-fellows who had, as he expressed
it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, finding
life a good thing whether he was roaming the streets, sitting idly
on the wharves, or stretched on the floor at home reading a favorite
author.

Almost all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and
Hawthorne, like his fellows, lived in the magic world of Shakespeare
and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Bunyan. _The Pilgrim's Progress_
was an especial favorite with him, its lofty spirit carrying his soul
into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without
understanding. For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in
the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Me., where the family lived for a
time. Here, he says, he led the life of a bird of the air, with no
restraint and in absolute freedom. In the summer he would take his
gun and spend days in the forest, doing whatever pleased his vagabond
spirit 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
pass the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, warmed by the
blaze of the fallen evergreens.

But he had to return to Salem to prepare for college, whither he went
in 1821, in his seventeenth year. He entered Bowdoin, and had among
his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce,
afterward President of the United States. Here Hawthorne spent happy
days, and long afterward, in writing to an old college fr