and with what a paternal air he makes the tales yield their morsels of wisdom! There is no opening of dark passages, no peering into recesses, but a happy, generous spirit reigns throughout. All this could have been predicated from the delightful glimpses which we now have of Hawthorne’s relations to his children, glimpses which his Note-Books, indeed, had already afforded, and which were not wanting also in his finished work. Nor was this interest in childhood something which sprang up after he had children of his own. In that lonely period of his young manhood, when he held converse only with himself, his Note-Books attest how his observation took in the young and his fancy played about them. As early as 1836 he makes a note: “To picture a child’s (one of four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s day,—his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a whipping, etc.” Again, how delicate is the hint conveyed in a passage describing one of his solitary walks! “Another time I came suddenly on a small Canadian boy, who was in a hollow place among the ruined logs of an old causeway, picking raspberries,—lonely among bushes and gorges, far up the wild valley; and the lonelier seemed the little boy for the bright sunshine, that showed no one else in a wide space of view except him and me.” He has elsewhere a quick picture of a boy running at full speed; a wistful look at a sleeping infant, which somehow touches one almost as if one had seen a sketch for a Madonna; and then this passage, significant of the working of his mind,—he is noting a Mediterranean boy from Malaga whom he saw on the wharf: “I must remember this little boy, and perhaps I may make something more beautiful of him than these rough and imperfect touches would promise.”