Hawthorne’s boyhood was passed partly at Salem, partly on the shores of Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. His reading for pleasure included Clarendon and Froissart, to say nothing of that old-time boys’ delight, the Newgate Calendar. The first book that he bought with his own money was Spenser’s _Faery Queen_. At sixteen he had read _Caleb Williams_, _St. Leon_, and _Mandeville_. ‘I admire Godwin’s novels and intend to read all of them.’ He entered Bowdoin College in the same class with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, and was graduated in 1825. For the next twelve years he lived the life of a recluse in his own home at Salem, indulging his passion for writing and for taking twilight walks. It was the period of his literary apprenticeship. Later he was, as he says, ‘drawn somewhat into the world and became pretty much like other people.’ In 1828 he published, anonymously and at his own expense, a novel, _Fanshawe_. He made some mystery about it, binding by solemn promises the few who were in the secret of the authorship, not to betray it. The public was indifferent to the book, and Hawthorne afterwards destroyed the copies he could find. His early sketches and stories were published in annuals such as ‘The Token,’ and in periodicals such as ‘The New England Magazine,’ ‘Knickerbocker,’ and ‘The Democratic Review.’ For the most part they ‘passed without notice.’ In 1837 appeared a volume of eighteen of these sketches and stories, to which Hawthorne gave the title of _Twice-Told Tales_. An enlarged edition, containing twenty-one additional stories, appeared in 1842. Between the two, Hawthorne brought out a group of children’s stories, _Grandfather’s Chair_, _Famous Old People_, and the _Liberty Tree_, all in 1841, and _Biographical Stories for Children_, 1842. When Bancroft became Collector of the Port of Boston, he appointed Hawthorne as weigher and gauger (1839). Thrown out by the change of administration (1841), Hawthorne invested his savings in the Brook Farm enterprise. This move (described by his latest biographer as ‘the only apparently freakish action of his life’) was made in the hope of providing a home for his betrothed, Sophia Peabody. He threw himself with good humor into the life of the community, planted potatoes, cut straw, milked three cows night and morning, and signed his letters to his sister ‘Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman.’ Reports circulated that the author of the _Twice-Told Tales_ might be seen dressed in a farmer’s frock, carrying milk to Boston every morning; also that he was ‘to do the travelling in Europe _for the Community_.’ Brook Farm proved ‘thralldom and weariness,’ and Hawthorne abandoned it, losing, as he later discovered, the one thousand dollars he had invested. In July, 1842, he married and settled in the ‘Old Manse’ at Concord.