Yet clear and searching as must then have been his perceptions, he had not always formulated them or made them his chief concern. On May 16, 1819 (the first spring after coming to the new abode), he writes to his uncle Robert that "we are all very well"; and "the grass and some of the trees look very green, the roads are very good, there is no snow on Lymington mountains. The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brooke. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again." Happy boy! he thinks he has found his vocation: it is, to shoot henhawks and catch trout. But his uncle, fortunately, is otherwise minded, though Nathaniel writes, in the same note: "Mother says she can hardly spare me." The sway of outdoor life must have been very strong over this stalwart boy's temperament. One who saw a great deal of him has related how in the very last year of his life Hawthorne reverted with fondness, perhaps with something of a sick and sinking man's longing for youthful scenes, to these early days at Sebago Lake; "Though it was there," he confessed, "I first got my cursed habits of solitude." "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. "Ah," he said, "how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!... Everything is beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!" The same writer mentions the author's passion for the sea, telling how, on the return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way: "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again." I have it from his sister that he used to declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the salt spray in his blood.