In 1852 it was ten years since Hawthorne had lived there, and though he
might have renewed his acquaintance with it while the writing was
going on, there is no record of his having done so; and considering the
unfavorable weather, and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which
writers seek is enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical
effect of a landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it
improbable that he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books
contain but few comments upon the routine of life of the community; his
letters to his wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can
trace several of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the
romance. The episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the
scene of the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably
close reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years
before, Hawthorne had been an actor.

The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the
hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there
are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the
spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse
of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage
containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for
Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old
surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red
nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He
leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent,
addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain
intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some
former period of his life, but, falling into decay, he now haunts about
the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered. The word
ragamuffin," he adds, with characteristic determination to be exact,
"does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow
or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind
of dignity in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle
correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old
Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy.
But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage,
likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Par