Produced by David Widger THE DOLIVER ROMANCE AND OTHER PIECES TALES AND SKETCHES By Nathaniel Hawthorne FRAGMENTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF A SOLITARY MAN I. My poor friend “Oberon”--[See the sketch or story entitled “The Devil in Manuscript,” in “The Snow-Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.”]--for let me be allowed to distinguish him by so quaint a name--sleeps with the silent ages. He died calmly. Though his disease was pulmonary, his life did not flicker out like a wasted lamp, sometimes shooting up into a strange temporary brightness; but the tide of being ebbed away, and the noon of his existence waned till, in the simple phraseology of Scripture, “he was not.” The last words he said to me were, “Burn my papers,--all that you can find in yonder escritoire; for I fear there are some there which you may be betrayed into publishing. I have published enough; as for the old disconnected journal in your possession--” But here my poor friend was checked in his utterance by that same hollow cough which would never let him alone. So he coughed himself tired, and sank to slumber. I watched from that midnight hour till high noon on the morrow for his waking. The chamber was dark; till, longing for light, I opened the window-shutter, and the broad day looked in on the marble features of the dead. I religiously obeyed his instructions with regard to the papers in the escritoire, and burned them in a heap without looking into one, though sorely tempted. But the old journal I kept. Perhaps in strict conscience I ought also to have burned that; but casting my eye over some half-torn leaves the other day, I could not resist an impulse to give some fragments of it to the public. To do this satisfactorily, I am obliged to twist this thread, so as to string together into a semblance of order my Oberon’s “random pearls.”