Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a RomanceHawthorne, Nathaniel
Science
Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Fiction
_Note 5._ In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify
a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same,
I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the
earlier draft: “The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a
disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody’s business centres there at
one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the
original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those
Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth
about the country churches,--the little Norman, square, battlemented
stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of
view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard
was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from
sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the
real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history;
there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous
qualities of strength and courage for him;--all these, mingled with
succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with
the sexton’s spade; until every blade of grass was human more than
vegetable,--for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much
time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in
the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on
them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental
appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first
settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the
sculptor’s art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled,
surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which
made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark,
high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the
street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the
ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the
rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead
people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm
themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being
haunted.”
_Note 6. Author’s note_.--“The spiders are affected by the weather and
serve as barometers.--It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor
really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous.”
_Note 7. Author’s note_.--“The townspeople are at war with the
Doctor.--Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.--The
result of Crusty Hannah’s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some
strange way.--Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized
in the street scenes.”
CHAPTER II.
_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Read the whole paragraph before copying any
of it.”
_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious
needlework, etc.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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