"It is no great matter at all events. I felt most kindly towards the poor fugitives, but knew not precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in the least how to help them. For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant on their own account to hasten them forward to the strangers' land; and I think my prevalent idea was that, whoever may be benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes, the childhood of whose race has now gone forever, and who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world on very unequal terms. On behalf of my own race, I am glad, and can only hope that an inscrutable Providence means good to both parties." The whimsical feature in Hawthorne's character to which we have alluded, is thus noticed by an intimate and valued friend of the great author:-- "Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly upon his mind. He told me once that while he had been consul at Liverpool a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection--who was to provide for them if they became free? and, as he said with a sigh, 'While I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So I recollect, on the old battlefield of Manassas, on which I strolled in company with Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, footsore, wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine, some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the remark, 'I am not sure that we were doing right, after all. How can those poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' "Thus this ingrained and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course vigorously. "He thought on the whole that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists were in the right, but then he was never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character." There is a constant temptation to transcend proper limits in quoting from this most characteristic production of our great author. It was my purpose simply to recall to the minds of readers an article whose authorship was scarcely known at the time of its appearance (in the July of 1862), and which has never been included in its writer's collected works. Nothing in Hawthorne's books--not even excepting "Twice-Told Tales"--is more suggestive and eloquent of the man and the author.