(2) Another type of Hawthorne's stories illustrates the history of New England. Such are _The Gentle Boy_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_, _Endicotts Red Cross_, and _Lady Eleanore's Mantle_. We may even include in this list _Young Goodman Brown_, in one sense an unreal and fantastic tale, but in another, historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of witches in a forest. If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker persecution of New England, let us open _The Twice-Told Tales_ and read the story of _The Gentle Boy_, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and invokes woe upon the Puritans. (3) We shall occasionally find in these volumes what eighteenth-century readers of the _Spectator_ would have called a "paper," that is, a delightful bit of mixed description and narration, "a narrative essay" or "a sketch," as some prefer to call it. In this class we may include _The Old Manse_, _The Old Apple-Dealer_, _Sights from a Steeple_, _A Rill from the Town Pump_, and the masterly _Introduction to The Scarlet Letter_. _The Old Manse_, the first paper in _Mosses from an Old Manse_, is excellent. Hawthorne succeeds in taking his readers with him up the Assabeth River, in a boat made by Thoreau. We agree with Hawthorne that a lovelier river "never flowed on earth,--nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination." When we return with him at the end of that day's excursion, we are almost tempted to say that we can never again be enslaved as before. We feel that we can say with him:-- "We were so free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again tomorrow. When we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were whispering to us, 'Be free! Be free.'" These volumes entitle Hawthorne to be ranked among the greatest of short-story writers. Like Irving, Hawthorne did not take the air line directness of narration demanded by the modern short story; but the moral truth and beauty of his tales will long prove their elixir of life, after the passing of many a modern short story which has divested itself of everything except the mere interest in narration.