Although she was such a housewife, she had a great independence of thought. A woman had come to Concord, with no husband, and given birth to a child. This, for New England at that time, was a terrible scandal. The boy was my age and went to school. All the other boys whispered behind his back as if he had been in jail, although by this time his mother was properly married to a young farmer up on Barret’s Hill. No one ever spoke to her in church or bowed. My mother, very quietly, every summer, put on her best clothes and walked the mile or more up the hill to call. To me Hawthorne always typified the haughty Southerner. I did not know what haughty Southerners were like, but I had heard them talked about and supposed they were very superior creatures—an idea my worthy relatives would have promptly squelched had they known it. Hawthorne was a hero to me, and whenever I read a romance, such as _Ivanhoe_ or the “Iliad,” I pictured the conqueror as tall, broad, dark, and spare, with a dark mustache. This was the way Hawthorne looked to me. I would never have dared speak to him, and do not remember having seen him at the house; but, of course, the Old Manse was filled with memories of his presence. I remember staring for hours at a time at the words he wrote on the window of the dining room, and wondering how he did it. It read: “On this day my daughter Una was born, while the trees are all glass chandeliers.” What a sentence for a boy to dream about! It is still there, and there are many other windows with his name only. I had never seen any diamond rings; none of my womenfolk wore rings, and it seemed strange to me how anyone could write on a pane of glass! Hawthorne, contrary to public opinion, did not own the Old Manse, but only rented it from the Ripleys. In fact, he lived there only a year or more. It was a great disillusion to find later that the grown-ups of my family did not consider him a great hero, and in fact thought his writing on the windows a horrible defacement of the house—especially as they had had some difficulty in collecting the rent. My most vivid memory of Hawthorne is during the time I was attending the intermediate school. In front of the building was the town square, separated from the school by an iron fence. Here we boys used to play baseball, and upon going home, I, forgetful as always, would invariably leave behind my dinner pail or my jacket. I was invariably sent back to fetch it.