Relief from this situation came in a most wholesome way. In 1839 George Bancroft secured for Hawthorne a position as weigher and gauger in the Boston Customhouse, and thus his lonely life of brooding came to an end. In discharging his duties he came into much-needed everyday contact with practical men and affairs. This office he held for two years until the Whigs won the presidential election and the Democrats went out of power. Meanwhile he had written _Grandfather's Chair,_ a collection of children's stories concerning early New England history. Somewhat previous to the appointment to the office in the Customhouse had taken place an event which was even more full of important meaning. While he was living in Salem he had become acquainted with the Peabody family and in their home had met the young woman who later became his wife, and who brought into his life the powerful influence for good that more than anything else developed the fine qualities of his nature and drew forth his powers as a writer. He had preferred to live hidden away from every one if he must give up the beauty and purity of the thought-world for the harshness and ugliness of the actual world without. But in his association with Sophia Peabody his faith in the reality that lay back of his beautiful visions was so strengthened that he felt a deep peace and joy never known to him before. The loveliness of her character is shown in her letters, and it is not surprising that Hawthorne should on one occasion write, in response to a letter from her, "I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and, whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy, and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it." In the summer of 1842 Hawthorne and Miss Peabody were married and went to live in the "Old Manse," in Concord. In the preceding year he had unfortunately invested money in a settlement known as the Brook Farm, where people of different classes of society were to live together on an equality, all sharing alike the duties of the farm life, and all contributing to the expenses of the common living. The experiment proved a failure and Hawthorne withdrew disgusted. With this hope of providing for himself and his wife destroyed, he found it necessary to work industriously, and as a result a new series of stories for children, the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, appeared in 1846.