Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester (at
whose sessions it may have been that Hawthorne read Enfield's "Speaker,"
the name of which had "a classical sound in his ears," long, long
afterward, when he saw the author's tombstone in Liverpool), came to
hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after
this in Hawthorne's boyish history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary
still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing
on the fly-leaf the legend: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., with the
respects of J. E. Worcester." For a long time, in the worst of his
lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the
floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely
fond of cats,--a taste which he kept through life; and during this
illness, forced to odd resorts for amusement, he knitted a pair of
stockings for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When
tired of reading, he diverted himself with constructing houses of books
for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps
erecting triumphal arches for her to pass under. In this period he must
have taken a considerable range in literature, for his age; and one
would almost say that Nature, seeing so rare a spirit in a sound body
that kept him sporting and away from reading, had devised a seemingly
harsh plan of luring him into his proper element.
It was more likely after this episode than before, that Bunyan took that
hold upon him so fraught with consequences.
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