never have had to wait for their money; for he never spent until after he had earned. However, these indispensable personages were all enabled to receipt their bills before their customer left Concord; and so everybody was made happy.

His next visit to his mother's home was made in the winter of 1844.

SALEM, Dec. 20, 1844.

SWEETEST PHOEBE, - It will be a week to-morrow since I left you. Our mother and sisters were rejoiced to see me, and wish me to stay here till after Christmas, which I think is next Wednesday; but I care little for festivals. My only festival is when I have you. But I suppose we shall not get home before the last of next week. If I had not known it before, I should have been taught by this separation that the only real life is to be with you, and to share all things, good or evil, with you. The time spent away from you is unsubstantial, there is nothing in it; and yet it has done me good, in making me more conscious of this truth.

Give. Una a kiss, and her father's blessing. She is very famous in Salem. We miss you and her greatly here in Castle Dismal. Louisa complains of the silence of the house; and not all their innumerable cats avail to comfort them in the least. When Una and three or four or five other children are grown up and married off, you will have a little leisure, and may paint that Grecian picture which used to haunt your fancy. But then our grandchildren Una's

children and those of the others will be coming upon the stage. In short, after a woman has become a mother, she may find rest in heaven, but nowhere else. I have been much affected by a little shoe of Una's, which I found on the floor. Does she walk well yet? YOUR HUSBAND.

-There has been a good deal of speculation as to the precise nature of the episode which Hawthorne used, nine years later, to give color to the culminating scene of the "Blithedale" tragedy. I therefore print the record of it here, as it stands in his journal; and it shall conclude this chapter. The date, it will be noticed, is that of the first anniversary of his marriage.

"On the night of July 9, 1843, a search for the dead body of a drowned girl. She was about nineteen years old; a girl of education and refinement, but depressed and miserable for want of sympathy,her family being an affectionate one, but uncultivated, and incapable of responding to her demands. She was of a melancholic temperament, accustomed to solitary walks in the woods. At this time she had the superintendence of one of the district schools, comprising sixty scholars, particularly difficult of management. Well, Ellery Channing knocked at the door, between nine and ten in the evening, in order to get my boat to go in search of the girl's drowned body. He took the oars, and I the paddle, and we went rapidly down the river, until, a good distance

below the bridge, we saw lights on the bank, and the dim figures of a number of people waiting for us. Her bonnet and shoes had already been found on this spot, and her handkerchief, I believe, on the edge of the water; so that the body was probably at no great distance, unless the current (which is gentle and almost imperceptible) had swept her down.

"We took in General Buttrick, and a young man in a blue frock, and commenced the search; the General and the other man having long poles, with hooks at the end, and Ellery a hay-rake, while I steered the boat. It was a very eligible place to drown one's self. On the verge of the river there were waterweeds; but after a few steps the bank goes off very abruptly, and the water speedily becomes fifteen or twenty feet deep. It must be one of the deepest spots in the whole river; and, holding a lantern over it, it was black as midnight, smooth, impenetrable, and keeping its secrets from the eye as perfectly as mid-ocean would. We caused the boat to float once or twice past the spot where the bonnet, etc., had been found, carefully searching the bottom at different distances from the shore, but for a considerable time without success. Once or twice the pole or the rake caught in bunches of water-weed, which in the starlight looked like garments; and once Ellery and the General struck some substance at the bottom, which they at first mistook for the body, but it was probably a sod that had rolled in from the bank. All this time, the persons on the bank were