[Footnote: See _ante_, p. 89.] Himself he described as
having gone to sea at twenty, and having been a wanderer ever since. In.
speaking of the date of the poetry, "We could not have been more than
ten years old," he said. This, of course, is a mistake, the accident
having happened in 1819, when Hawthorne was fourteen. And it is
tolerably certain that he did not even visit Raymond until he was
twelve.
The letter called out some reminiscences from Mr. Robinson Cook, of
Bolster's Mills, in Maine, who had also known Hawthorne as a boy; some
poetry on the Tarbox tragedy was also found, and printed, which
afterward proved to have been written by another person; and one or two
other letters were published, not especially relevant to Hawthorne, but
concerning the Tarbox affair. After this, "W. S." wrote again from
Alexandria (November 23, 1870), revealing the fact that he had come into
possession, several years before, of the manuscript book from which he
afterward sent extracts. The book, he explained, was found by a man
named Small, who had assisted in moving a lot of furniture, among it a
"large mahogany bookcase" full of old books, from the old Manning House.
This was several years before the civil war, and "W. S." met Small in
the army, in Virginia. He reported that the book--"originally a bound
blank one not ruled," and "gnawed by mice or eaten by moths on the
edges"--contained about two hundred and fifty pages, and was written
throughout, "the first part in a boyish hand though legibly, and showing
in its progress a marked improvement in penmanship.
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