g into
it, was "given up to ghosts and cobwebs." Some of these ghosts have been
shiveringly described by Hawthorne himself in the marvellous paragraph
of the introduction already referred to: "Our [clerical] ghost used to
heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlour, and sometimes
rustle paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper
entry--where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright
moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of
manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.

"Once while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the
twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown
sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to
brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible.

"A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to
be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking,
ironing,--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour--although
no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning.
Some neglected duty of her servitude--some ill-starched ministerial
band--disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work
without wages."

The little drawing-room once remodelled, however, and the kitchen given
over to the Hawthorne pots and pans--in which the great Hawthorne
himself used often to have a stake, according to the testimony of his
wife, who once wrote in this connection, "Imagine those magnificent eyes
fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking in an iron kettle!"--the ghosts
came no more. Of the great people who in the flesh passed pleasant hours
in the little parlour, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Margaret
Fuller are names known by everybody as intimately connected with the
Concord circle.

Hawthorne himself cared little for society. Often he would go to the
village and back without speaking to a single soul, he tells us, and
once when his wife was absent he resolved to pass the whole term of her
visit to relatives without saying a word to any human being. With
Thoreau, however, he got on very well. This odd genius was as shy and
ungregarious as was the dark-eyed "teller of tales," but the two appear
to have been socially disposed toward each other, and there are
delightful bits in the preface to the "Mosses" in regard to the hours
they spent toget