joists, and vexing the whole antiquity of the place with their
discordant renovations. Soon, moreover, they divested our abode
of the veil of woodbine which had crept over a large portion of
its southern face. All the aged mosses were cleared unsparingly
away; and there were horrible whispers about brushing up the
external walls with a coat of paint--a purpose as little to my
taste as might be that of rouging the venerable cheeks of one's
grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more
sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up
our household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our
pleasant little breakfast-room--delicately-fragrant tea, an
unpurchasable luxury, one of the many angel-gifts that had
fallen like dew upon us--and passed forth between the tall
stone gate-posts, as uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our
tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the hand,
and--an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no
irreverence in smiling at--has led me, as the newspapers
announce while I am writing, from the old Manse into a Custom
House! As a story-teller, I have often contrived strange
vicissitudes for my imaginary personages, but none like this.
The treasure of intellectual gold which I had hoped to find in
our secluded dwelling, had never come to light. No profound
treatise of ethics--no philosophic history--no novel, even,
that could stand unsupported on its edges--all that I had to
show, as a man of letters, were these few tales and essays,
which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my
heart and mind."

The _Mosses from an Old Manse_ he declared the last offering of their
kind he should ever put forth; "unless I can do better," he wrote in
this Introduction, "I have done enough in this kind." He went to his
place in the Custom House, in his native city, and if President Taylor's
advisers had not been apprehensive that in his devotion to ledgers he
would neglect the more important duties of literature, perhaps we should
have heard no more of him; but those patriotic men, remembering how much
they had enjoyed the reading of the _Twice-Told Tales_ and the _Mosses_,
induced the appointment in his place of a whig, who had no capacity for
making books, and in the spring of last year we had _The Scarlet
Letter_.

Like mo