Hawthorne was born in this town of his affection and his distrust on the Fourth of July, 1804. When he was four years old his father, a shipmaster, died during a foreign voyage. The sobering effect of this loss was increased by the way in which Mrs. Hawthorne solemnized it, for she dedicated her life to mourning, not only withdrawing from the outer world but even taking all her meals apart from her little daughters and her son. An accident to the boy when he was nine years old robbed him of healthy companionship with playmates by keeping him out of active sports for the next three years. So he developed, a bookish child in a muffled household. At this time he was reading Shakespeare, Milton, and the eighteenth-century poets; later he was to transfer allegiance to the romantic novelists. In his fifteenth year the family lived together for several months at Raymond, Maine, a "town" of a half-dozen houses on the shore of Sebago Lake. "There," he told his publisher, James T. Fields, late in life, "I lived ... like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." The need of proper tutoring for college preparation caused his reluctant return to Salem, and he was glad to escape from it again when he went back in Maine to Bowdoin College at the age of seventeen. He was not at all eager for college, but regarded it as an unavoidable step in his training. At the same time he rejected the prospect of entering the church, the law, or the practice of medicine, and even as a freshman he wrote to his mother, "What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen?" With such a point of view he did no better work than could have been expected. He was more interested in the reading of his own choice than in the assigned studies. He was somewhat frivolous, and even incurred discipline for minor offenses concerning which he wrote to his mother with amused and amusing frankness. He finished a shade below the middle of his class, and left Bowdoin with no more college interest than he had brought to it.