That which strikes one most in recalling our intercourse with our cousin at this time is that our conversation did not consist of commonplaces; we talked for hours on literary subjects, or, if persons were under discussion, they were such as had a real interest; the books we were reading were the chief theme. The low garden was generally the scene of these conversations, and it was here we read and talked all through the long summer afternoons ... Nathaniel Hawthorne had a perennial charm,--his influence on our cousin was permanent,--and we turned from all other books to Hawthorne's with fresh delight. There is in existence a well-worn copy of the _Twice-Told Tales_ that was seldom out of our hands. [It is in the Preface to this book that Hawthorne boasts of being "the obscurest man of letters in America."].... Our cousin was at this and all other times very particular about his dress and appearance; it seemed to us then that he assumed a certain exaggeration with regard to them; we did not understand how consistent it all was with his idea of life.... He was not at all fond of walking, and it is doubtful if he cared for mountain scenery for its own sake. He responded to the moods of Nature with a sensitiveness that was natural to him, but it was her quiet aspects which most affected him. He was a native of "the land where it is always afternoon." But life was not all play with young Shorthouse. At the age of sixteen his father took him into the chemical works which had been founded by the great-grandfather, and, although his father and later his brother were indulgent to him in many ways, the best of his energies went to this business until within a few years of his death. There is something incongruous, as has been remarked, in the manufacture of vitriol and the writing of mystical novels. In 1857 he married Sarah Scott, whom he had known for a number of years, and the young couple took a house in Edgbaston, the suburb of Birmingham in which they had both grown up and where they continued to live until the end. Mrs. Shorthouse tells of the disposition of his hours. He went regularly to business at nine, came home to dinner in the middle of the day, and returned to town till nearly seven. The evenings, after the first hour of relaxation, were mostly devoted to studying Greek, reading classics and divinity, and the seventeenth-century literature, which had always possessed a peculiar fascination for him. During the years from 1866 to 1876 he was slowly putting together his story of _John Inglesant_, and with the exception of his wife, no one saw the writing, or, indeed, knew that he had a work of any such magnitude on hand. For four years he kept the completed manuscript, which was rejected by one or two publishers, and then, in 1880, he printed an edition of a hundred copies for private distribution. One of these fell into the hands of Mrs.