John Hathorne, a son of the first settler, was a judge of the poor creatures who were put to death as witches at Salem in 1692. The great romance writer says that this ancestor "made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. ...I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed." Tradition says that the husband of one of the tortured victims appealed to God to avenge her sufferings and murder. Probably the ancestral curse hanging over _The House of the Seven Gables_ would not have been so vividly conceived, if such a curse had not been traditional in the Hawthorne family. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England ancestor, and the first of his family to add a "w" to his name, was born in Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port in 1808. Hawthorne's mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for a while on the shore of Sebago Lake, Maine. "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I got my cursed habits of solitude." Shyness and aversion to meeting people became marked characteristics. His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ and Shakespeare's plays were special favorites. Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ was the first book that he bought with his own money. Bunyan and Spenser probably fostered his love of the allegorical method of presenting truth, a method that is in evidence in the bulk of Hawthorne's work. He even called his daughter Una, after one of Spenser's allegorical heroines, and, following the suggestion in the _Faerie Queene_, gave the name of "Lion" to the large cat that came to her as a playmate. At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he met such students as Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge, in after years a naval officer, who published in 1893 a delightful volume called _Personal Reminiscences of Nathaniel Hawthorne_. These friends changed the course of Hawthorne's life. In his dedication of _The Snow Image_ to Bridge in 1850, Hawthorne says, "If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself."