"Mamma, where is the old Witch House? I met on the street this morning Johnnie Evans and his mother, who came way down from Boston just to see that, and Witch Hill, and some other places here in Salem that they had been reading about together this vacation. Why, I haven't seen these things, and I have lived here all my life. And they said, too, that they were going to find the house where Hawthorne was born. Who was he, mamma? I think Johnnie said that the house was on Union Street. Can't I go there, too? I am tired of playing out in the street all the time. I want to go somewhere and see something." So said Reuben Tracy to his mother, as he came into the house from his play one day about the middle of his long summer vacation. His little eyes had just been opened to the fact that there was something in old Salem which made her an object of interest to outsiders; and, if so, he wanted to see it. As his mother listened to him, her eyes were opened, too, to her want of interest, through which her boy should have been obliged to ask this of her, rather than that she should have guided him into this pleasant path to historic knowledge. But she determined that this should not happen again. The vacation was only half through, and there was yet time to do much in this direction. Her boy should not spend so much time in idle play in the streets. She would begin that very afternoon and read to him some stories of local history, and impress upon his little mind, as Mrs. Evans was doing with her boy, by visiting with him all that she could of the places mentioned. She herself had not seen Hawthorne's birthplace; she would learn more about him and his work, so as to tell Reuben, and then they would visit the place together; after which they would take a trip to Concord and see where he was buried, and also the places where he had lived, which, she had heard, were so charming. She could then tell her boy of Emerson and Thoreau; and, through a sight of the place where the first battle of the Revolution was fought, she could lead him willingly into the study of history. Thus Mrs. Tracy planned with herself. She had suddenly become converted to a knowledge of her larger duty in the training of her child--her only child now; for, nearly two years before, death had claimed, in one week, her two other children, one older and one younger than Reuben; and since then she had fallen into a sad, listless state of mind which she found hard to get out of. She was an unusually good mother in the ordinary sense of the word, since she was careful to have her boy well-fed, well-clothed, and well-behaved; but now she saw more than that was required of her.