In his studies Hawthorne must have followed his own will very freely. He refused to declaim, and no power could make him do so, and for this reason he was denied the honor of a Commencement part, which he had won, being number eighteen by rank in his class; he was nervously shy about declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at on his first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens, were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he especially mentions Rees's Cyclopśdia--such was the wealth of a boy of genius in those days--but among the eight hundred books it is certain that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes on ways of exterminating it,--all for the benefit of his uncle, who took the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a memory of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my novel." His way of life intellectually had not changed since his schoolboy days, for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his studies, but only the books he read; so now he read the books for pleasure, and let his studies subsist as best they could in the realm of duty. He was poor, and even in the modest simplicity of this country college, where his expenses could hardly have been three hundred dollars a year, was evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the state of his clothes seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he was self-respecting, patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of hating debt; and he went on his way little burdened except by doubtful hopes.