The wife of ex-President Pierce died in December, 1863, and Hawthorne went to New Hampshire to attend the funeral. When he passed through Boston, on his return, he appeared to Mr. Fields ill and more nervous than usual. Dreary events seemed to thicken around his path. In the last days of March, 1864, Mr. Fields saw him again; and by this time his appearance had greatly changed. "The light in his eye was as beautiful as ever, but his limbs were shrunken, and his usual stalwart vigor [was] utterly gone." A photograph taken not long before that date represents him with cheeks somewhat emaciated, and a worn, strangely anxious, half-appealing expression, which, while singularly delicate and noble, is extremely sad. Soon after this, in March, he set out for Washington with Mr. William Ticknor, Mr. Fields's senior partner in the publishing firm of Ticknor & Fields. The travelling companions spent two or three days in New York, and had got as far as Philadelphia, when Mr. Ticknor was taken suddenly ill, at the Continental Hotel, and died the next day. Stunned, wellnigh shattered by this sinister event, Hawthorne was almost incapacitated for action of any sort; but there were kind and ready friends in Philadelphia who came to his aid, and relieved him from the melancholy duty which he would else have had to meet. He returned to Concord, in what forlorn state an extract from a letter of Mrs. Hawthorne's may best convey: "He came back unlooked for, that day; and when I heard a step on the piazza, I was lying on a couch and feeling quite indisposed. But as soon as I saw him I was frightened out of all knowledge of myself,--so haggard, so white, so deeply scored with pain and fatigue was the face, so much more ill than ever I saw him before." Mrs. Hawthorne still hoped for some favorable turn, if he could but obtain a complete change of scene and escape from the austere New England spring, into some warmer climate. "He has not smiled since he came home till to-day," she wrote, "when I made him laugh, with Thackeray's humor, in reading to him." She was constant in her care; she would scarcely let him go up and down stairs alone. But not the most tender solicitude, nor any encouragement of unquenchable hope, could now avail to help him.