Hawthorne must have enjoyed the meetings of the Club or he would not have attended them so regularly. He wrote an account of the first occasion on which he was present, giving an accurate description of the dinner itself and enclosing a diagram of the manner in which the guests were seated, but without any commentary on the proceedings of the day. It was, after all, one of the nerve-centres of the great world, and an agreeable change from the domestic monotony of the Wayside. Thackeray would have descried rich material for his pen in it, but Hawthorne’s studies lay in another direction. Great men were not his line in literature. Meanwhile Mrs. Hawthorne and her daughter were transforming their Concord home into a small repository of the fine arts. Without much that would pass by the title of elegance, they succeeded in giving it an unpretentious air of refinement, and one could not enter it without realizing that the materials of a world-wide culture had been brought together there. Hawthorne soon found the dimensions of the house too narrow for the enlarged views which he had brought with him from abroad, and he designed a tower to be constructed at one corner of it, similar to, if not so lofty as that of the Villa Manteuto. This occupied him and the dilatory Concord carpenter for nearly half a year; and meanwhile chaos and confusion reigned supreme. There was no one whose ears could be more severely offended by the music of the carpenter’s box and the mason’s trowel than Hawthorne, and he knew not whether to fly his home or remain in it. Not until all this was over could he think seriously of a new romance. He made his study in the upper room of the tower; a room exactly twenty feet square, with a square vaulted ceiling and five windows,--too many, one would suppose, to produce a pleasant effect of light,--and walls papered light yellow. There he could be as quiet and retired as in the attic of his Uncle Robert Manning’s house in Salem. Conway states that he wrote at a high desk, like Longfellow, and walked back and forth in the room while thinking out what he was going to say. The view from his windows extended across the meadows to Walden woods and the Fitchburg railroad track, and it also commanded the Alcott house and the road to Concord village. It was in this work-shop that he prepared “Our Old Home” for the press and wrote the greater part of “Septimius Felton” and “The Dolliver Romance.” The War was a new source of distraction. It broke out before the tower was finished, stimulating Hawthorne’s nerves, but disturbing that delicate mental equilibrium upon which satisfactory procedure of his writing depended. On May 26, 1861, he wrote to Horatio Bridge: