Judge Pyncheon’s duplicity is revealed to Holgrave by the medium of a daguerreotype. Men or women who are actors in real life should avoid being photographed, for the camera is pretty sure to penetrate their hypocrisy, and expose them to the world as they actually are. Every photograph album is to a certain extent a rogues’ gallery, in which our faults, peculiarities, and perhaps vices are ruthlessly portrayed for the student of human nature. If a merchant were to have all his customers photographed, he would soon learn to distinguish those who were not much to be trusted. Notice also Hawthorne’s eye for color. When Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe are about to leave the seven-gabled house for the last time, “A plain, but handsome dark-green barouche” is drawn to the door. This is evidently his idea of a fine equipage; and it happens that the background of Raphael’s “Pope Julius” is of this same half-invisible green, and harmonizes so well with the Pope’s figure that few realize its coloring. The plot of this picturesque story is the most ingenious of Hawthorne’s life, but sufficiently probable throughout to answer the purpose of a romance, and it is the only one of Hawthorne’s larger works which ends happily. It was brought out by Ticknor & Company at Easter 1850,--less than ten weeks after it was finished; but we think of the House of the Seven Gables as standing empty, deserted and forlorn. In December Emerson had written to Hawthorne concerning a new magazine in which he and Lowell were interested, and if Hawthorne would only give it his support its success could not be questioned. What Hawthorne replied to this invitation has never been discovered, but he had seen too many such periodicals go to wreck to feel much confidence in this enterprise. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 381.] It is of more importance now that Emerson should have addressed him as “My dear Hawthorne,” for such cordial friendliness was rare in “the poet of the pines.” Mrs. Alcott once remarked that Emerson never spoke to her husband otherwise than as “Mr. Alcott,” and it is far from likely that he ever spoke to Hawthorne differently from this. The conventionalities of letter-writing run back to a period when gentlemen addressed one another--and perhaps felt so too--in a more friendly manner than they do at present. Works of fiction and sentimental poetry stir up a class of readers which no other literature seems to reach, and Hawthorne was soon inundated with letters from unknown, and perhaps unknowable, admirers; but the most remarkable came from a man named Pyncheon, who asserted that his grandfather had been a judge in Salem, and who was highly indignant at the use which Hawthorne had made of his name. [Footnote: Conway, 135.] This shows how difficult it is for a writer of fiction or a biographer to escape giving offence. The lightning is sure to strike somewhere. “THE SNOW IMAGE”