Fanny Kemble made an interesting figure on her great black horse at the gate. The Sedgwick neighbors were thoughtful and serviceable. O'Sullivan reappeared for a moment in all his Celtic vivacity, and Fields, Holmes, Duyckinck, and others of the profession came and went in the summer days. Hawthorne breathed the air of successful authorship at last, and knew its vanities and its pleasures. The mail brought him new acquaintances, and now and then a hero-worshiper lingered at the gate for a look. But as the warm days went by, and the frosts came, he found himself in his old sheltering nook, in a place removed from the world, living practically alone with his wife and children, though the increasing sense of friendliness in the world cheered and warmed him. He had, however, begun to age. He was forty-six years old, and the last year had told upon him, with its various anxieties, excitement, and hard labor with the pen. He was more easily fatigued, he was less robust and venturesome, less physically confident. He showed the changes of time. On his arrival, "weary and worn," says his wife, "with waiting for a place to be, to think, and to write in," he gave up with something like nervous fever; "his eyes looked like two immense spheres of troubled light; his face was wan and shadowy, and he was wholly uncomfortable." He soon recovered tone; but though he pleaded that his mind never worked well till the frosts brought out the landscape's autumnal colors and had some similar alchemy for his own brain, it was a needed rest that he enjoyed while giving and receiving these early hospitalities in a new country. He even found the broad mountain view, with the lake in its bosom, a distraction which made it hard for him to write in its presence. He had always been used to narrow outlooks from his windows; even at the Old Manse the scene was small though open. With the coming of the fall days, however, he again took up his writing, and showed how stimulating to his ambition and energies the first taste of popularity had been. Indeed from this time he was more productive than at any other period, and wrote regularly and successfully as he had never before done. The scale of the novel gave more volume to his work of itself, and its mere continuity sustained his effort; moreover the excitement of a new kind of work was a strong stimulus. He now began to write novels, differently studied and composed from his earlier stories, more akin to the usual narrative of fiction. "The Scarlet Letter," a work of pure imagination, was the climax of his tales, the furthest reach of his romantic allegorizing moral art in creation; but he now undertook to utilize his experience and observation in the attempt to delineate life in its commoner and more realistic aspects of character and scene. He began "The House of the Seven Gables" in September and finished it early in January. He wrote regularly, but the story went on more slowly than