On September 9, 1859, my mother says in her diary, "My husband gave me his manuscript to read." There are no other entries on that clay or the next, except, "Reading manuscript." On the 11th she says, "Reading manuscript for the second time." The diary refers to reading the manuscript on the third day, but on the two following days, in which she was to finish as much of the romance as was ready, there are wholly blank spaces. These mean more than words to me, who know so well how she never set aside daily rules, and how unbrokenly her little diaries flow on. She writes home:-- "Mr. Hawthorne has about finished his book. More than four hundred pages of manuscripts are now in the hands of the publishers. I have read as much as that, but do not yet know the denouement. He is very well, and in very good spirits, despite all his hard toil of so many months. As usual, he thinks the book good for nothing, and based upon a very foolish idea which nobody will like or accept. But I am used to such opinions, and understand why he feels oppressed with disgust of what has so long occupied him. The true judgment of the work was his first idea of it, when it seemed to him worth the doing. He has regularly despised each one of his books immediately upon finishing it. My enthusiasm is too much his own music, as it were. It needs the reverberation of the impartial mind to reassure him that he has not been guilty of a betise. "Mr. Hawthorne had no idea of portraying me in Hilda. Whatever resemblance one sees is accidental." On November 8 (we were then in Leamington once more) she records in very large script, "My husband to-day finished his book, 'The Romance of Monte Beni.'" My mother was especially fortunate in finding the smallest rose-tinted and most gleaming among the shells which we came across upon the sands, and of these a few superlative but almost invisible specimens were long the cherished possession of her English work-box. She often went with me to the sands, spending much time there; her diary saying: "Superb, calm day. I went on sands with Rosebud to gather shells. Stayed three hours." Or: "Most superb day possible. I went on the sands with Rose, and sat all the morning in a sand-chair, reading, while Rose played. It was a divine day; the air like rose petals, the sky cerulean, the sea sapphire. I felt so serene and quiet;--a great calm." Then comes the inevitable contrast: "Tremendous sea. Rose and I went on the sands to gather shells." These shells, which we could none of us find in so perfect a state as my mother could, were object-lessons to me in the refinements of art, as the harebells were in the refinements of nature; for were not the dancing flowers alive, and the stirless shells the passive work of thought?