There are stories of horror and psychological mystery. The author of ‘Markheim’ might have chosen a theme like that treated in ‘Wakefield,’ or in ‘The Prophetic Pictures.’ His handling would have been different. We do not gladly suffer an obvious moral in these days. No one would now dare to put ‘A Parable’ for the explanatory title of his narrative, as Hawthorne has done in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ or advise the reader that the experiences of David Swan (if experiences those can be called where a man sleeps and things _do not_ happen to him) argue ‘a superintending Providence.’ In _Mosses from an Old Manse_ Hawthorne’s gain in power is marked. He still ‘moralizes’ his legends; but the force of the conception and the richness of the imagery drive the philosophy into the background. The grim and uncanny humor of which Hawthorne had a masterful command is displayed to the full in this book. No better illustration can be cited than the scene where the old witch Mother Rigby exhorts the scarecrow, she had so cunningly fashioned, to be a man. It is a grotesque, a gruesome, and a mirth-provoking scene. Hawthorne had brooded long over the superstitious past with which his own history was so singularly linked. Among the fruit of these meditations was the story of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ Like the minister in the fearful narrative of ‘Thrawn Janet,’ Goodman Brown had been in the presence of the powers of evil; but unlike the minister, he no longer believed in virtue. _Mosses from an Old Manse_ also includes odd conceits such as ‘The Celestial Railroad,’ a new enterprise built from the famous City of Destruction, a ‘populous and flourishing town,’ to the Celestial City. The dreamer in this modern Pilgrim’s Progress takes the journey under the personal conduct of Mr. Smooth-it-away and notes with interest the improvements in methods of transportation since Bunyan’s time. Less ingenious but no less amusing are ‘The Hall of Fantasy,’ ‘The Procession of Life,’ and ‘The Intelligence Office.’ Monsieur de l’Aubépine loved an allegorical meaning. Between the _Twice-Told Tales_ and the _Mosses_ Hawthorne published a group of children’s stories. _Grandfather’s Chair_ and the two succeeding volumes consist of little narratives of colonial history, in which our national exploits are celebrated in the tone of confident Americanism so much deplored by Professor Goldwin Smith. There are ‘asides’ for grown people, as when Grandfather tells the children that Harvard College was founded to rear up pious and learned ministers, and that old writers called it ‘a school of the prophets.’ ‘Is the college a school of the prophets now?’ asked Charley. ‘You must ask some of the recent graduates,’ answered Grandfather.