The commerce in time went to Boston, and many of the sons of Salem followed it to help build up the wealth and character of the larger city. In fact where have not the sons, like the vessels, of Salem gone? Their memory is green in the old town and the citizen points with pride to the former residence-site of many a distinguished man she calls her son; of Bowditch, mathematician and author of the famous _Navigator_, of Judge Story and his no less eminent son, the poet and sculptor, of W. H. Prescott, the heroic historian of Spain, of Jones Very, poet and mystic, and of many another man of mark in law and literature. But of all the distinguished sons of Salem no one makes so eloquent an appeal to the popular heart as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors are particularly interested in the places associated with his life and romances. Of these [Illustration: Wm H. Prescott] there are many, for the novelist lived at one time or another in half a dozen Salem houses, while several are identified with his stories. To appreciate Hawthorne one should read him here, in the old Puritan town with its ancient houses, several of which date from the seventeenth century, its commemorative tablets, ancient tombstones, family names, and the collections of the Essex Institute. With magic pen he traced the greatness and the littleness of the Puritan age, its austere piety, its intolerance, its stern repression of the lighter side of human nature, its moral grandeur and its gloomy splendor. He did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country. Another “Wizard of the North,” he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history; he summoned the great dead again to live and move among us.