r, who was her junior, and used by us to distinguish between
her and that other Elizabeth who was Aunt Lizzie Peabody). Of my
grandmother Hawthorne I have no personal recollection at all; she was
a Manning, a beautiful old lady, whom her son resembled. She had been
a recluse from society for forty years; it was held to be good form, in
that age and place, to observe such Hindoo rites after the death of a
husband; hers had died in his thirty-fourth year in Surinam. But she
had also insensibly fallen into the habit of isolating herself in some
degree from her own family; they were all of them addicted to solitude
of the body, though kindly enough disposed in the abstract. When we
went to live in the Mall Street house, the old lady and her daughters
uprooted themselves from their home of many years in Herbert Street and
dwelt with us; and that quaint crystallization of their habits was in a
measure broken up. But the dowager Mrs. Hawthorne, it soon appeared, had
come there to die; she was more than seventy years old. My aunt Louisa I
seem dimly to recall as a tall, fragile, pale, amiable figure, not very
effective. My aunt Ebe I afterwards came to know well, and shall defer
mention of her. So I was encompassed by kindly petticoats, and was very
happy, but might have been better for a stout playmate of my own sex.
I had a hobby-horse, which I rode constantly to fairy-land in quest of
treasure to bestow upon my friends. I swung with Una on the gate, and
looked out upon the wonder of the passing world. The tragedy of my
grandmother's death, which, as I have said, interrupted the birth of
The Scarlet Letter, passed me by unknowing, or rather without leaving a
trace upon my memory. On the other hand, I can reconstitute vividly two
absurd incidents, destitute of historical value. After my grandmother
Hawthorne's death I fell ill; but the night before the disease declared
itself, I was standing in a chair at the nursery window, looking out at
the street-lamp on the corner, and my aunt Lizzie Peabody, who had just
come on from Boston, was standing behind me, lest I should fall off.
Now, I was normally the most sweet-tempered little urchin imaginable;
yet suddenly, without the faintest warning or provocation, I turned
round and dealt my loving aunt a fierce kick in the stomach. It deprived
her of breath for a space; but her saintly nature is illustrated by the
fact that the very first use she made of her recovered faculties was
to ga