And now, as after repeated griefs and lengthened anxieties I think I am come to that period of second youth of which you speak, I am permitted to delight in the marvelous beauty and infinite delicacy of the narration of "The Scarlet Letter," and the deep insight into human hearts and minds shown in that and the later production. When I am tempted to lay down the burden which, of one kind or another, mortals must daily bear, and forget that "all human liberty is but a restraint self-imposed or consented to," I shall call to mind the touching moment when Hester Prynne sadly bound up her flowing tresses, but just released, and meekly reassumed the badge of her shame. And the little Phoebe,--with her genial sympathies and cheerful tones,--I am not altogether without hope that she may aid me to throw off some of the morbid tendencies which have ever clung to my life (if, perchance, this last moral lesson should not destroy the first); and these sorrows once overcome, existence would not lose its corresponding exquisiteness of enjoyment. I once lived in the "Old Hawthorne house;" whether or not you, sir, ever crossed the threshold tradition hath not deigned to inform me. Possibly you lived there when a child. And if the spirit renew itself once in seven years, as the body is said to do, the soul of those younger hours may have remained, may have shared with us our more ethereal pleasures, while it frowned on our prosaic sports. At least, to some such fancy as this, united with the idea of second childhood before alluded to, must be referred the folly of which I have been guilty in addressing a person, who, so far as bodily presence is concerned, is to me an entire stranger, and to whom I am utterly unknown. However, sir, humbly begging your pardon for this same folly, and entreating that by no accident may the shades of the Salem witches become aware of it, I am yours with much esteem, MARY A. PORTER. Upon the envelope Hawthorne has written, "Answered, July 18th." The letter has been preserved out of many thrown aside, and Mrs. Hawthorne has spoken to me of Mary Porter as of a real friend. Her delicacy and good sense of expression contrast well with the over-fanciful, unliterary quality of the letters of persons who came prominently forward as teachers of thought and literature, and who no doubt jarred miserably in their letters, if not in their conversation, upon the refined skill of Hawthorne and his wife. At any rate (and though the intercourse with these persons to whom I refer with daring comment was received most gratefully and cordially as generally the best to be found) Mary Porter was never forgotten.