The result was that a small position in the Boston Custom House was soon awarded to the young author. On going down from Salem to inquire about it, he received another and better appointment as weigher and gauger. His friend Pike was installed there at the same time. To Longfellow, Hawthorne wrote in good spirits:-- "I have no reason to doubt my capacity to fulfil the duties; for I don't know what they are. They tell me that a considerable portion of my time will be unoccupied, the which I mean to employ in sketches of my new experience, under some such titles as follows: 'Scenes In Dock,' 'Voyages at Anchor,' 'Nibblings of a Wharf Rat,' 'Trials of a Tide-Waiter,' 'Romance of the Revenue Service,' together with an ethical work in two volumes on the subject of Duties; the first volume to treat of moral duties and the second of duties imposed by the revenue laws, which I begin to consider the most important." His hopes regarding unoccupied time were not fulfilled; he was unable to write with freedom during his term of service in Boston, and the best result of it for us is contained in those letters, extracts from which Mrs. Hawthorne published in the first volume of the "American Note-Books." The benefit to him lay in the moderate salary of $1,200, from which the cheapness of living at that time and his habitual economy enabled him to lay up something; and in the contact with others which his work involved. He might have saved time for writing if he had chosen; but the wages of the wharf laborers depended on the number of hours they worked, and Hawthorne--true to his instinct of democratic sympathy and of justice--made it a point to reach the wharf at the earliest hour, no matter what the weather might be, solely for the convenience of the men. "It pleased me," he says in one of his letters, "to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence."