he and Hawthorne were "not more than ten years old." This, at first, would seem to suggest that he was relying still further upon the editorial. But if he had been taking the editorial statement as a basis for fabrication, it is not likely that he would have failed to ascertain exactly the date of the freezing of Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox, which was 1819. The careless way in which he alludes to this may have been the inadvertence of an impostor trying to make his account agree with one already published; but it is more likely that the sender of the notes did not remember the precise year in which the accident occurred, and was confused by the statement of the "Transcript." An impostor must have taken more pains, one would think. It must also be noticed that "the Widow _Haw_thorne" is spoken of in the notes. Sims, however, in his preliminary letter, refers to the fact that "the universal pronunciation of the name in Raymond was Hathorn,--the first syllable exactly as the word 'hearth' was pronounced at that time"; and the explanation of the spelling in the notes doubtless is that Sims, or whoever transcribed the passage, changed it as being out of keeping with the now historic form of the name. It is possible that further changes were also made by the transcriber; and a theory which has some color is, that the object in keeping the original manuscript out of the way may have been, to make it available for expansions and embellishments, using the actual record as a nucleus. II. The theme referred to in Chapter III. is given in full below. After the earlier portion of the present essay had been stereotyped, an article by Professor G. T. Packard, on Bowdoin College, was published in "Scribner's Monthly," which contains this mention of Hawthorne:--