in of imaginative composition--My
grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to
calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall
Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The
haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The
upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The
flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the
quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa
and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt
Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book
of the age.

My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned
woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the aid
of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on the
walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach me all
the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed according
to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But
as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters
mathematical especially; so that I gave her inexhaustible patience many
a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle
of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta; though the battle itself,
and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John,
stood clearly pictured in my imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to
my memory nothing arbitrary would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself
constructing a narrative, whether it be true or fictitious, I am
wedded to dates, and cannot be divorced from them. It must be set
down precisely when the events took place, in what years the dramatis
personae were born, and how old they were when each juncture of their
fortunes came to pass. I can no more dispense with dates than I can talk
without consonants; they carry form, order, and credibility. Or they
are like the skeleton which gives recognizable shape to men and animals.
Nothing mortal can get on without them..

Whether this addiction be in the nature of a reaction from my childish
perversity, giving my erudite and beloved aunt Lizzie (as I called her)
her revenge so long after our lessons are over; or how else to explain
it, I know not; but it leads me to affirm here that the nadir of my
father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At that time
his age was five-and-forty, and