By GHACE E. SELLON

One of the most daring of those who engaged in the sea-fights of the American Revolution was Daniel Hawthorne, commander of a privateer, a man whose courage and enterprise won for him the title of "Bold Daniel." He came of one of the earliest American families, one that had been established in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1637, and had contributed not a little to the fame of that seaport, for his ancestors had been leaders among those whose stern and narrow views of justice had led them to persecute the Quakers and later to put to death innocent people during the awful period of the Salem witchcraft. Yet the same hardihood and fearless uprightness that had won esteem for Daniel Hawthorne had distinguished the family from the very first, and was passed on to the brave commander's descendants. His son Nathaniel, like the long line of notable men who had gone before him, possessed a strict sense of right and wrong, much courage and an especial fondness for the adventurous life on the sea. Though he contributed nothing to the celebrity of his forefathers, his son and namesake, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Salem, on July 4, 1804, gained for the old New England family a glory that will last.

It was in the home built by his father's father that Nathaniel was born and that he spent the first four years of his life. Yet he was never privileged to hear from the old captain's lips of the exciting sea- skirmishes in which the "Fair America," under the command of "Bold Daniel," had encountered and held her own against British vessels, for his grandfather had died many years before. Nor did the young boy ever know the pleasure of companionship with his father, who died in South America in 1808. In a great measure, too, he was deprived of association with his mother from the time when, following her husband's death, she removed with her children to her father's home, in another part of Salem. So deeply did she feel her loss that she shut herself away from the world during the remainder of her lifetime, and kept such strict privacy that she did not even take her meals with her family. The children were naturally quiet and reserved, and with the example of their mother's seclusion always before them, they took little part in the life outside of their home. Nathaniel did not like school, and, being under the care of relatives who allowed him much freedom, he missed a considerable part of the early school training that most boys receive. Yet his time was not wasted, for there were good books in his home, and these he read of his own free will.

When he was about eight or nine years of age, his mother took her children to live for a time upon property owned by her family on the shore of Lake Sebago, in Maine. Then began a period of great delight for the young boy and his sisters. As the land was mostly covered with woods and the settlements were far apart, there were endless opportunities for fishing and hunting and roaming about the woods or spending long, uninterrupted hours with favorite authors. In the winter Nathaniel passed much time in skating on Lake Sebago, feeling wholly free and at home in the midst of the wild life of nature.

So far as the boy's wishes were concerned, these days in Maine might have continued indefinitely; but his mother, feeling that he needed the discipline of regular study, sent him back to Salem to be prepared by a private teacher for entrance into Bowdoin College. The result of this training was that when he was about eighteen he became a member of the class at Bowdoin to which Longfellow and Horatio Bridge belonged, and thus began a career at college in which he proved himself a somewhat wayward student. The grind and drudgery of courses uninteresting to him he shunned, yet he would not let himself fail in any work that he undertook. Subjects that he liked he mastered readily.

Though he found no pleasure in breaking college rules, yet he made no pretensions to being a model student. He played cards in his room when he might have been studying, and would go off on a fishing trip when the fancy took him, without much regard for unfinished lessons. He looked forward with undisguised pleasure to his vacations spent at home, and on one occasion was so overcome by his desire to bring his studies to an end and leave Brunswick that, a short time before the close of the term, he wrote to his sister Louisa demanding that she invent an excuse for his return home. After stating five reasons for thus quitting Bowdoin, he continued:

"If you are at a loss for an excuse, say that mother is out of health; or that Uncle R. is going a journey on account of his health, and wishes me to attend him; or that Elizabeth is on a visit at some distant place, and wishes me to come and bring her home; or that George Archer has just arrived from sea, and is to sail again immediately, and wishes to see me before he goes; or that some of my relations are to die or be married, and my presence is necessary on the occasion. And lastly, if none of these excuses will suit you, and you can think of no other, write and order me to come home without any. If you do not, I shall certainly forge a letter, for I will be at home within a week. Write the very day you receive this. If Elizabeth were at home, she would be at no loss for a good excuse. If you will do what I tell you, I shall be Your affectionate brother, NATH. HAWTHORNE.

"My want of decent clothes will prevent my calling at Mrs. Sutton's.
Write immediately, write immediately, write immediately.

"Haste, haste, post-haste, ride and run, until these shall be delivered. You must and shall and will do as I desire. If you can think of a true excuse, send it; if not, any other will answer the same purpose. If I do not get a letter by Monday, or Tuesday at farthest, I will leave Brunswick without liberty."

It is an interesting fact that this impetuous young student was regarded as the finest-looking man at Bowdoin. He was not much less than six feet tall, and was strong, supple and well proportioned. His dark hair waved back from a handsomely formed face; and his deep blue eyes, under their heavy brows, impressed one with their remarkable brightness and expressiveness.

Though it may seem surprising, it is true that Nathaniel Hawthorne was not at all conscious in his early youth of the great possibilities that lay in him to become a writer, and that not until he had advanced in his college course did he form the purpose of making literature a profession. As early as sixteen years of age he had written verses that had been published; yet he was far from believing that he had poetic power. That he did not at this time take very seriously his ability as a writer, may be judged from this passage in a letter to his mother written in March, 1821:

"I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend the vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have.

"The being a minister is of course out of the question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as—a puddle of water.

"As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation.

"A physician, then, seems to be 'Hobson's choice;' but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And it would weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient 'ad inferum,' which being interpreted is, 'to the realms below.' Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession!

"What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull. But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same predicament as the honest gentleman in 'Espriella's Letters,'—

'I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
A-musing in my mind what garment I shall wear.'"

However, by the time of his graduation from Bowdoin College he had laid aside his jesting and doubt, and in the following period of remarkable seclusion spent in his mother's home in Salem he gave himself to the work of composition. Thirteen years he passed thus in a sort of ideal world, so shut away from his neighbors that they scarcely knew of his existence.

Hawthorne always felt that these years of seclusion were peculiarly significant in his life, in that they enabled him to keep, as he said, "the dews of his youth and the freshness of his heart." Still, he realized that he had been much deceived in fancying that there, in his solitary chamber, he could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind.

Of all that was written in these years the author gave out for publication only the romance Fanshawe, which he regarded later as a very inferior production, and the various stories published at length in the collection known as Twice Told Tales. Fame came very slowly. Though the worth of these writings was discovered by people of good literary judgment, it was not of the kind to make them widely popular. Sometimes the young author was so overcome by discouragement that it would seem as if only the confidence in his final success felt by his friends could save him from despair.

Relief from this situation came in a most wholesome way. In 1839 George Bancroft secured for Hawthorne a position as weigher and gauger in the Boston Customhouse, and thus his lonely life of brooding came to an end. In discharging his duties he came into much-needed everyday contact with practical men and affairs. This office he held for two years until the Whigs won the presidential election and the Democrats went out of power. Meanwhile he had written Grandfather's Chair, a collection of children's stories concerning early New England history.

Somewhat previous to the appointment to the office in the Customhouse had taken place an event which was even more full of important meaning. While he was living in Salem he had become acquainted with the Peabody family and in their home had met the young woman who later became his wife, and who brought into his life the powerful influence for good that more than anything else developed the fine qualities of his nature and drew forth his powers as a writer. He had preferred to live hidden away from every one if he must give up the beauty and purity of the thought-world for the harshness and ugliness of the actual world without. But in his association with Sophia Peabody his faith in the reality that lay back of his beautiful visions was so strengthened that he felt a deep peace and joy never known to him before. The loveliness of her character is shown in her letters, and it is not surprising that Hawthorne should on one occasion write, in response to a letter from her, "I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and, whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy, and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it."

In the summer of 1842 Hawthorne and Miss Peabody were married and went to live in the "Old Manse," in Concord. In the preceding year he had unfortunately invested money in a settlement known as the Brook Farm, where people of different classes of society were to live together on an equality, all sharing alike the duties of the farm life, and all contributing to the expenses of the common living. The experiment proved a failure and Hawthorne withdrew disgusted. With this hope of providing for himself and his wife destroyed, he found it necessary to work industriously, and as a result a new series of stories for children, the Mosses from an Old Manse, appeared in 1846.

In the same year he was made surveyor of the collection of revenue at the Salem Customhouse. Then for a time he ceased to write, until his discovery among some rubbish in the customhouse of an old manuscript that gave him excellent material for a greater work of fiction than he had ever before attempted, called him back to literary effort. The actual composition of the book was not begun, however, until the day on which Hawthorne lost his position as surveyor.

When he made known this unfortunate event to his wife, instead of becoming depressed, she exclaimed joyfully, "Oh, then, you can write your book!" and a little later, pulling open a drawer, showed him a considerable sum of money that she had been saving all unknown to him. Thus it became possible for him to devote himself to the work that proved to be his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. The unusual excellence of the romance brought to the writer far-spread praise and popularity, and he became at length recognized as a foremost American man of letters.

The Hawthornes now went to live at Lenox, in the mountains of western Massachusetts. In their delightful home in this place the novelist produced a second great romance, The House of the Seven Gables, and then gave up four months to rest. This vacation was largely a playtime spent with his two older children, Una and Julian, the younger daughter Rose being then only a baby. He had worked so hard that he was ready for plenty of fun, and this he and his two young playfellows found in excursions for wild flowers or nuts, in bathing in the lake or sending over its surface home-made toy sail-boats, in romping through the woods or reading or story-telling. After this happy period it is not surprising that Hawthorne should have written easily and with enjoyment the Wonder Book for children, a simple and entertaining series of stories in which old legends are put into attractive new forms.

[Illustration: WAYSIDE, HAWTHORNE'S HOME AT CONCORD]

After the removal from Lenox in 1851, the family stayed for a short time in West Newton, where The Blithedale Romance was written, and then settled at the Wayside, the second of the famous homes of Hawthorne in Concord. Not long afterward were published the Tanglewood Tales, which continue the Wonder Book series; and a biography of his intimate friend, Franklin Pierce. When in 1853 Pierce became president of the United States, he appointed Hawthorne to be the consul at Liverpool, England, and thus came to an end the quiet life at Concord.

The publicity into which Hawthorne's duties as consul brought him was very disagreeable to one of his retiring disposition. He could feel at ease only among those whose gentle and sensitive natures responded to his own; hence attendance at formal dinners, speech making and other social obligations that forced him often into the company of more or less uncongenial people, seemed scarcely bearable to him. It was with relief then, that he resigned the consulate in 1857 and went to live in southern Europe. The greater part of his time until his return to America in 1860 was passed in Italy, and near Florence was written the last of his celebrated romances, The Marble Faun.

During the four remaining years of his life, spent at the Wayside, in Concord, Hawthorne's strength gradually ebbed away. Nevertheless, he was able to produce Our Old Home, in which he described scenes from English life, as well as Septimus Felton and parts of two other romances. In 1864, while traveling for his health through southern New Hampshire with his friend Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne died in the quiet, sudden way in which he had hoped that he should pass from earth. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where a simple headstone marks his grave.

As the cheerfulness and simple beauty of Hawthorne's stories for children are as light among the gloom and sadness that overshadowed his works for older people, so his love for children and his delight in their companionship illumine his character and bring into view his rare gentleness and purity of nature. In recalling the days when she was a little girl, his daughter Rose has told us:

"My father's enjoyment of frolicking fun was as hilarious as that accorded by some of us to wildest comic opera. He had a delicate way of throwing himself into the scrimmage of laughter, and I do not for an instant attempt to explain how he managed it. I can say that he lowered his eyelids when he laughed hardest, and drew in his breath half a dozen times with dulcet sounds and a murmur of mirth between. Before and after this performance he would look at you straight from under his black brows, and his eyes seemed dazzling. I think the hilarity was revealed in them, although his cheeks rounded in ecstasy. I was a little roguish child, but he was the youngest and merriest person in the room when he was amused."

Though the suffering and wrong that he saw in the world deeply perplexed and saddened him, yet he found so much of happier meaning in life and expressed this with such marvelous power and grace that no one to-day holds a worthier place in American literature. That no successor can take this place nor imitate the subtle beauty of his style, we feel to be true as we read the lines written by the poet Longfellow, just after the death of Hawthorne:

"Now I look back, and meadow, manse and stream
Dimly my thought defines;
I only see—a dream within a dream—
The hill-top hearsed with pines.

"I only hear above his place of rest
Their tender undertone,
The infinite longings of a troubled breast,
The voice so like his own.

"There in seclusion and remote from men
The wizard hand lies cold,
Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen,
And left the tale half told.

"Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
And the lost dew regain?
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Unfinished must remain!"

THE PINE-TREE SHILLINGS
[Footnote: From Grandfather's Chair.]

By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Captain John Hull was the mint-master of Massachusetts, and coined all the money that was made there. This was a new line of business, for in the earlier days of the colony the current coinage consisted of gold and silver money of England, Portugal, and Spain. These coins being scarce, the people were often forced to barter their commodities instead of selling them.

For instance, if a man wanted to buy a coat, he perhaps exchanged a bear-skin for it. If he wished for a barrel of molasses, he might purchase it with a pile of pine boards. Musket-bullets were used instead of farthings. The Indians had a sort of money called wampum, which was made of clam-shells, and this strange sort of specie was likewise taken in payment of debts by the English settlers. Bank-bills had never been heard of. There was not money enough of any kind, in many parts of the country, to pay the salaries of the ministers, so that they sometimes had to take quintals of fish, bushels of corn, or cords of wood instead of silver or gold.

As the people grew more numerous and their trade one with another increased, the want of current money was still more sensibly felt. To supply the demand the general court passed a law for establishing a coinage of shillings, sixpences, and threepences. Captain John Hull was appointed to manufacture this money, and was to have about one shilling out of every twenty to pay him for the trouble of making them.

Hereupon all the old silver in the colony was handed over to Captain John Hull. The battered silver cans and tankards, I suppose, and silver buckles, and broken spoons, and silver buttons of worn-out coats, and silver hilts of swords that had figured at court,—all such curious old articles were doubtless thrown into the melting pot together. But by far the greater part of the silver consisted of bullion from the mines of South America, which the English buccaneers—who were little better than pirates—had taken from the Spaniards and brought to Massachusetts.

All this old and new silver being melted down and coined, the result was an immense amount of splendid shillings, sixpences, and threepences. Each had the date 1652 on the one side and the figure of a pine tree on the other. Hence they were called pine-tree shillings. And for every twenty shillings that he coined, you will remember, Captain John Hull was entitled to put one shilling into his own pocket.

The magistrates soon began to suspect that the mint-master would have the best of the bargain. They offered him a large sum of money if he would but give up that twentieth shilling which he was continually dropping into his own pocket. But Captain Hull declared himself perfectly satisfied with the shilling. And well he might be, for so diligently did he labor that in a few years his pockets, his money- bags, and his strong box were overflowing with pine-tree shillings.

When the mint-master had grown very rich a young man, Samuel Sewell by name, came a-courting to his only daughter. His daughter—whose name I do not know, but we will call her Betsey—was a fine, hearty damsel, by no means so slender as some young ladies of our own days. On the contrary, having always fed heartily on pumpkin pies, doughnuts, Indian puddings, and other Puritan dainties, she was as round and plump as a pudding herself. With this round, rosy Miss Betsey did Samuel Sewell fall in love. As he was a young man of good character, industrious in his business, and a member of the church, the mint-master very readily gave his consent.

"Yes, you may take her," said he, in his rough way, "and you'll find her a heavy burden enough."

On the wedding-day we may suppose that honest John Hull dressed himself in a plum-colored coat, all the buttons of which were made of pine-tree shillings. The buttons of his waist-coat were sixpences, and the knees of his small clothes were buttoned with silver threepences. Thus attired, he sat with great dignity in Grandfather's chair, and, being a portly old gentleman, he completely filled it from elbow to elbow. On the opposite side of the room, between her bridemaids, sat Miss Betsey. She was blushing with all her might, and looked like a full-blown peony or a great red apple.

There, too, was the bridegroom, dressed in a fine purple coat and gold- lace waistcoat, with as much finery as the Puritan laws and customs would allow him to put on. His hair was cropped close to his head, because Governor Endicott had forbidden any man to wear it below the ears. But he was a very personable young man, and so thought the bride- maids and Miss Betsey herself.

The mint-master also was pleased with his new son-in-law, especially as he had courted Miss Betsey out of pure love, and had said nothing at all about her portion. So, when the marriage ceremony was over, Captain Hull whispered a word to two of his men-servants, who immediately went out, and soon returned lugging in a large pair of scales. They were such a pair as wholesale merchants use for weighing bulky commodities, and quite a bulky commodity was now to be weighed in them.

"Daughter Betsey," said the mint-master, "get into one side of these scales."

Miss Betsey—or Mrs. Sewell, as we must now call her—did as she was bid, like a dutiful child, without any question of the why and wherefore. But what her father could mean, unless to make her husband pay for her by the pound (in which case she would have been a dear bargain), she had not the least idea.

"And now," said honest John Hull to the servants, "bring that box hither."

The box to which the mint-master pointed was a huge, square, iron-bound oaken chest; it was big enough, my children, for all four of you to play at hide-and-seek in. The servants tugged with might and main, but could not lift this enormous receptacle, and were finally obliged to drag it across the floor. Captain Hull then took a key from his girdle, unlocked the chest, and lifted its ponderous lid. Behold! it was full to the brim of bright pine-tree shillings fresh from the mint, and Samuel Sewell began to think that his father-in-law had got possession of all the money in the Massachusetts treasury. But it was only the mint-master's honest share of the coinage.

[Illustration: HANDFUL AFTER HANDFUL WAS THROWN IN]

Then the servants, at Captain Hull's command, heaped double handfuls of shillings into one side of the scales while Betsey remained in the other. Jingle, jingle, went the shillings as handful after handful was thrown in, till, plump and ponderous as she was, they fairly weighed the young lady from the floor.

"There, son Sewell!" cried the honest mint-master, resuming his seat in
Grandfather's chair, "take these shillings for my daughter's portion.
Use her kindly and thank Heaven for her. It is not every wife that's
worth her weight in silver."