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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Passages from a Relinquished Work, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Passages from a Relinquished Work
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9232]
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK ***
+
+
+
+
+Passages from a Relinquished Work
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+AT HOME
+
+From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made
+me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes,
+using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between
+myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been
+very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men
+and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father’s
+pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a
+wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of
+them, have run the course which this volume will describe. Yet there is
+room for doubt whether I should have been any better contented with
+such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,—at least, till
+after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
+trial.
+
+My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
+place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
+page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
+hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
+gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
+powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
+pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones,
+would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such
+pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
+with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the
+whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in
+imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and
+belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable
+adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering his
+sermons could have supported the good parson’s health under the mental
+toil which they cost him in composition.
+
+Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a
+warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose,
+to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
+tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a good and
+wise man after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself,
+it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any
+mode of education with which it was possible for him to be acquainted
+have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier fortune
+than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
+nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it
+was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for
+parents have an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
+children, and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and
+affection of his parents which he cannot transfer to any delegate of
+their duties, however conscientious. An orphan’s fate is hard, be he
+rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old
+gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding
+out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
+and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
+
+I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
+of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
+fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in contact with the
+stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
+thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
+pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
+profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
+purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
+have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
+New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen;
+they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what
+they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man
+who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
+takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be
+satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent in
+its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that
+violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as
+if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,—with the
+drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
+soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence
+of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
+
+I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
+many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which
+I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been
+suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
+vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
+ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant
+than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
+day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering
+orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one
+illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere,—of Goldsmith, who
+planned and performed his travels through France and Italy on a less
+promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various
+qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking.
+Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up
+an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I
+must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives
+were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
+Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than
+seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit
+upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I
+had written romances instead of reciting them.
+
+The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
+intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
+mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
+cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
+was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had
+collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
+were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed,
+the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence
+was its own reward, though the hope of praise also became a powerful
+incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought as I
+did then, let me beseech the reader to believe that my tales were not
+always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be
+given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus
+my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames perhaps more valuable than
+the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
+characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the
+villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book
+for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by,
+though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller.
+
+A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.
+
+I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise. The day
+promised to be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay along
+the earth and settled in minute globules on the folds of my clothes, so
+that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost. The sky was
+quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible till they grew out
+of the fog as I came close upon them. There is a hill towards the west
+whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level course through the
+village and ascending an eminence on the other side, behind which it
+disappears. The whole view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I
+paused; and, while gazing through the misty veil, it partially rose and
+swept away with so sudden an effect that a gray cloud seemed to have
+taken the aspect of a small white town. A thin vapor being still
+diffused through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog,
+whether hung in air or based on earth, appeared not less substantial
+than the edifices, and gave their own indistinctness to the whole. It
+was singular that such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.
+
+Half of the parson’s dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of it
+was a cloud; but Squire Moody’s mansion, the grandest in the village,
+was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony under the
+front window; while in another place only two red chimneys were seen
+above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence, then
+tenanted by strangers. I could not remember those with whom I had dwelt
+there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank was in the
+clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of buildings
+had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods store of Mr.
+Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike’s tobacco
+manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian
+chief in front. The white spire of the meeting-house ascended out of
+the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy base were its only
+support: or, to give a truer interpretation, the steeple was the emblem
+of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet pointing to a cloudless
+atmosphere, and catching the brightness of the east on its gilded vane.
+
+As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy intervals
+and a border of trees between the wheeltrack and the sidewalks, all so
+indistinct, and not to be traced without an effort, the whole seemed
+more like memory than reality. I would have imagined that years had
+already passed, and I was far away, contemplating that dim picture of
+my native place, which I should retain in my mind through the mist of
+time. No tears fell from my eyes among the dewdrops of the morning; nor
+does it occur to me that I heaved a sigh. In truth, I had never felt
+such a delicious excitement nor known what freedom was till that moment
+when I gave up my home and took the whole world in exchange, fluttering
+the wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to
+another through the universe. I waved my hand towards the dusky
+village, bade it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path
+but that which might lead me back. Never was Childe Harold’s sentiment
+adopted in a spirit more unlike his own.
+
+Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote. Recollecting how the knight
+and Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road to Toboso,
+I began, between jest and earnest, to feel a similar anxiety. It was
+gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon than the braying of the
+dappled ass or the neigh of Rosinante. The sun, then just above the
+horizon, shone faintly through the fog, and formed a species of rainbow
+in the west, bestriding my intended road like a gigantic portal. I had
+never known before that a bow could be generated between the sunshine
+and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but
+was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar
+rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to
+which all omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway
+of futurity.
+
+I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred miles
+of home, and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The first
+precaution was reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson Thumpcushion
+might have put an untimely catastrophe to my story; but as nobody would
+be much affected by my disgrace, and all was to be suffered in my own
+person, I know not why I cared about a name. For a week or two I
+travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any guidance except the
+whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or the green bough that
+beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed its withered finger
+onward. All my care was to be farther from home each night than the
+preceding morning.
+
+A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.
+
+One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
+and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether of
+tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree. The first which offered itself
+was a wood,—not a forest, but a trim plantation of young oaks, growing
+just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out, while they admitted
+a few straggling beams, and thus produced the most cheerful gloom
+imaginable. A brook, so small and clear, and apparently so cool, that I
+wanted to drink it up, ran under the road through a little arch of
+stone without once meeting the sun in its passage from the shade on one
+side to the shade on the other. As there was a stepping-place over the
+stone wall and a path along the rivulet, I followed it and discovered
+its source,—a spring gushing out of an old barrel.
+
+In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch of a
+tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on the
+grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me. He was a slender
+figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the finest nor
+very fashionably cut. On hearing my footsteps he started up rather
+nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young man about my
+own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been reading till my
+intrusion. His book was evidently a pocket Bible. Though I piqued
+myself at that period on my great penetration into people’s characters
+and pursuits, I could not decide whether this young man in black were
+an unfledged divine from Andover, a college student, or preparing for
+college at some academy. In either case I would quite as willingly have
+found a merrier companion; such, for instance, as the comedian with
+whom Gil Blas shared his dinner beside a fountain in Spain.
+
+After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves,
+filled and emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit the
+stranger’s classical associations, that this beautiful fountain ought
+to flow from an urn instead of an old barrel. He did not show that he
+understood the allusion, and replied very briefly, with a shyness that
+was quite out of place between persons who met in such circumstances.
+Had he treated my next observation in the same way, we should have
+parted without another word.
+
+“It is very singular,” said I,—“though doubtless there are good reasons
+for it,—that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and lavish it
+everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat. Why should
+not we find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a barrel of good
+liquor at the foot of it?”
+
+“There is a loaf of bread on the tree,” replied the stranger, without
+even smiling—at a coincidence which made me laugh. “I have something to
+eat in my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with me, you shall be
+welcome.”
+
+“I accept your offer with pleasure,” said I. “A pilgrim such as I am
+must not refuse a providential meal.”
+
+The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the tree,
+but now turned round and regarded me with great earnestness, coloring
+deeply at the same time. However, he said nothing, and produced part of
+a loaf of bread and some cheese, the former being evidently home baked,
+though some days out of the oven. The fare was good enough, with a real
+welcome, such as his appeared to be. After spreading these articles on
+the stump of a tree, he proceeded to ask a blessing on our food, an
+unexpected ceremony, and quite an impressive one at our woodland table,
+with the fountain gushing beside us and the bright sky glimmering
+through the boughs; nor did his brief petition affect me less because
+his embarrassment made his voice tremble. At the end of the meal he
+returned thanks with the same tremulous fervor.
+
+He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my necessities,
+and showed it by becoming less reserved. On my part, I professed never
+to have relished a dinner better; and, in requital of the stranger’s
+hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company to supper.
+
+“Where? At your home?” asked he.
+
+“Yes,” said I, smiling.
+
+“Perhaps our roads are not the same,” observed he.
+
+“O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way,” answered I.
+“This morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home to-night; and
+a moment ago I dined at home. To be sure, there was a certain place
+which I called home; but I have resolved not to see it again till I
+have been quite round the globe and enter the street on the east as I
+left it on the west. In the mean time, I have a home everywhere, or
+nowhere, just as you please to take it.”
+
+“Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home,” said the
+young man, with solemnity. “We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but it
+is strange that we two should meet.”
+
+I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no satisfactory
+reply. But we had eaten salt together, and it was right that we should
+form acquaintance after that ceremony as the Arabs of the desert do,
+especially as he had learned something about myself, and the courtesy
+of the country entitled me to as much information in return. I asked
+whither he was travelling.
+
+“I do not know,” said he; “but God knows.”
+
+“That is strange!” exclaimed I; “not that God should know it, but that
+you should not. And how is your road to be pointed out?”
+
+“Perhaps by an inward conviction,” he replied, looking sideways at me
+to discover whether I smiled; “perhaps by an outward sign.”
+
+“Then, believe me,” said I, “the outward sign is already granted you,
+and the inward conviction ought to follow. We are told of pious men in
+old times who committed themselves to the care of Providence, and saw
+the manifestation of its will in the slightest circumstances, as in the
+shooting of a star, the flight of a bird, or the course taken by some
+brute animal. Sometimes even a stupid ass was their guide. May I not be
+as good a one?”
+
+“I do not know,” said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.
+
+We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I
+partly apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit of
+a stray patient. Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my sanity
+as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since I was fully
+aware of my own extravagances, while he acted as wildly, and deemed it
+heavenly wisdom. We were a singular couple, strikingly contrasted, yet
+curiously assimilated, each of us remarkable enough by himself, and
+doubly so in the other’s company. Without any formal compact, we kept
+together day after day till our union appeared permanent. Even had I
+seen nothing to love and admire in him, I could never have thought of
+deserting one who needed me continually; for I never knew a person; not
+even a woman, so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was,—so
+painfully shy, so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so often
+depressed by a weight within himself.
+
+I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before the
+public. A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of relinquishing
+the immunities of a private character, and giving every man, and for
+money too, the right which no man yet possessed, of treating me with
+open scorn. But about a week after contracting the above alliance I
+made my bow to an audience of nine persons, seven of whom hissed me in
+a very disagreeable manner, and not without good cause. Indeed, the
+failure was so signal that it would have been mere swindling to retain
+the money, which had been paid on my implied contract to give its value
+of amusement. So I called in the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole
+receipts, a mighty sum and was gratified with a round of applause by
+way of offset to the hisses. This event would have looked most horrible
+in anticipation,—a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or
+hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning blush;
+but the reality was not so very hard to bear. It is a fact that I was
+more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to
+my companion on the same evening. In my own behalf I was angry and
+excited, not depressed; my blood ran quick, my spirits rose buoyantly,
+and I had never felt such a confidence of future success and
+determination to achieve it as at that trying moment. I resolved to
+persevere, if it were only to wring the reluctant praise from my
+enemies.
+
+Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle trade;
+now I recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole powers
+cultivated to the utmost, and exerted with the same prodigality as if I
+were speaking for a great party or for the nation at large on the floor
+of the Capitol. No talent or attainment could come amiss; everything,
+indeed, was requisite,—wide observation, varied knowledge, deep
+thoughts, and sparkling ones; pathos and levity, and a mixture of both,
+like sunshine in a raindrop; lofty imagination, veiling itself in the
+garb of common life; and the practised art which alone could render
+these gifts, and more than these, available. Not that I ever hoped to
+be thus qualified. But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
+impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,
+I did my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of every defect;
+and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next
+attempt. It is one of my few sources of pride, that, ridiculous as the
+object was, I followed it up with the firmness and energy of a man.
+
+I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and
+kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of
+the moment; though I cannot remember ever to have told a tale which did
+not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and acquire a novelty
+of aspect as often as I repeated it. Oddly enough, my success was
+generally in proportion to the difference between the conception and
+accomplishment. I provided two or more commencements and catastrophes
+to many of the tales,—a happy expedient, suggested by the double sets
+of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the suits in Sir Piercy
+Shafton’s wardrobe. But my best efforts had a unity, a wholeness, and a
+separate character that did not admit of this sort of mechanism.
+
+THE VILLAGE THEATRE
+
+About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived at
+a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return from a
+summer’s campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a series of
+dramatic exhibitions. A moderately sized hall of the tavern had been
+converted into a theatre. The performances that evening were, The Heir
+at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the recitation of Alexander’s
+Feast between the play and farce. The house was thin and dull. But the
+next day there appeared to be brighter prospects, the playbills
+announcing at every corner, on the town-pump, and—awful sacrilege!—on
+the very door of the meeting-house, an Unprecedented Attraction! After
+setting forth the ordinary entertainments of a theatre, the public were
+informed, in the hugest type that the printing-office could supply,
+that the manager had been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement
+with the celebrated Story-Teller. He would make his first appearance
+that evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s
+Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
+audiences in all the principal cities. This outrageous flourish of
+trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
+made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
+celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the tale, it could hardly
+have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an unfilled
+plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether Mr.
+Higginbotham should live or die.
+
+In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
+the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice, in
+tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
+school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
+address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.
+
+In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
+took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion. My
+spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had already
+learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success. Passing a
+small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning dimly and a
+few people were entering the door, I went in with them, and saw my
+friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected about fifteen hearers,
+mostly females. Just as I entered he was beginning to pray in accents
+so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of his
+efforts both with God and man. There was room for distrust in regard to
+the latter. At the conclusion of the prayer several of the little
+audience went out, leaving him to begin his discourse under such
+discouraging circumstances, added to his natural and agonizing
+diffidence. Knowing that my presence on these occasions increased his
+embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a dusky place near the door,
+and now stole softly out.
+
+On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
+being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
+much the better chance for the Story-Teller. The bar was thronged with
+customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in the
+hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of
+impatient thunder,—all symptoms of all overflowing house and an eager
+audience. I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood at the side
+scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex. If a gentleman,
+how could he have performed the singing girl the night before in No
+Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why did she enact Young Norval, and now
+wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little
+Pickle? In either case the dress was pretty and the wearer bewitching;
+so that, at the proper moment, I stepped forward with a gay heart and a
+hold one; while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded at many
+a country ball, and the curtain, as it rose, discovered something like
+a country bar-room. Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a
+tale.
+
+The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
+clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there, it
+might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted
+me. The good people of the town, knowing that the world contained
+innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them, took it for
+granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome was but a feeble
+echo of those which had thundered around me in lofty theatres. Such an
+enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each person seemed a Briarcus
+clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping his feet and several cudgels
+in play with stamping and thumping on the floor; while the ladies
+flourished their white cambric handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow
+and red bandanna, like the flags of different nations. After such a
+salutation, the celebrated Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce
+so humble an affair as Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.
+
+This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
+afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to my
+shame, did I spare. I never knew the “magic of a name” till I used that
+of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated it, there were louder bursts
+of merriment than those which responded to what, in my opinion, were
+more legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the piece was
+incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which Little
+Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had fastened
+to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the queerest
+gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The audience,
+supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this long tail
+behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a tumult of
+approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches broke beneath
+them and left one whole row of my admirers on the floor. Even in that
+predicament they continued their applause. In after times, when I had
+grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example how much of
+fame is humbug; how much the meed of what our better nature blushes at;
+how much an accident; how much bestowed on mistaken principles; and how
+small and poor the remnant. From pit and boxes there was now a
+universal call for the Story-Teller.
+
+That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I left
+the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given me a
+letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to my
+assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
+Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
+conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no other
+than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it, affected me
+most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian
+standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the
+players,—the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy
+girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than modest,—pointing to these with
+solemn ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type
+of the austere duty, and they of the vanities of life.
+
+I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
+hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
+theatre. Another train of thought came over me. The stern old man
+appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
+authority with love as a father might, and even bending his venerable
+head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his own mistaken
+discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then held the letter in
+the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in
+my mind, and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a style of
+paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation which I could not have
+resisted had I but risked the trial. The thought still haunts me that
+then I made my irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.
+
+Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed me
+to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in spite of
+a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the liberal
+offers of the manager. As we walked onward, following the same road, on
+two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with
+tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my life.
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Passages from a Relinquished Work, by Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
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+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Passages from a Relinquished Work</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9232]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK ***</div>
+
+<h1>Passages from a Relinquished Work</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Nathaniel Hawthorne</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3>AT HOME</h3>
+
+<p>
+From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made me the
+subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes, using no
+distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between myself and his own
+three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been very different in their
+cases and mine, they being all respectable men and well settled in life; the
+eldest as the successor to his father’s pulpit, the second as a physician, and
+the third as a partner in a wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better
+prospects than either of them, have run the course which this volume will
+describe. Yet there is room for doubt whether I should have been any better
+contented with such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,&mdash;at
+least, till after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
+trial.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the place it
+occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a page as mine. In his
+own vicinity, among the lighter part of his hearers, he was called Parson
+Thumpcushion, from the very forcible gestures with which he illustrated his
+doctrines. Certainly, if his powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the
+damage done to his pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few
+dead ones, would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him.
+Such pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
+with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the whole
+weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in imagination, either
+the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and belabored his unhappy
+cushion as proxy for those abominable adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of
+the body while delivering his sermons could have supported the good parson’s
+health under the mental toil which they cost him in composition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a warm one,
+he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose, to me. With late
+justice, though early enough, even now, to be tinctured with generosity I
+acknowledge him to have been a good and wise man after his own fashion. If his
+management failed as to myself, it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must
+frankly say, could any mode of education with which it was possible for him to
+be acquainted have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier
+fortune than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
+nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it was my
+chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for parents have
+an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their children, and the
+child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and affection of his parents which
+he cannot transfer to any delegate of their duties, however conscientious. An
+orphan’s fate is hard, be he rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever
+I see the old gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me,
+holding out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
+and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity of
+spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and fanciful.
+What a character was this to be brought in contact with the stern old Pilgrim
+spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a thousand points; but our chief
+and final dispute arose from the pertinacity with which he insisted on my
+adopting a particular profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence,
+had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This
+would have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
+New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen; they
+will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what they call
+idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither
+studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming, but
+manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be satisfied with what his father
+left him. The principle is excellent in its general influence, but most
+miserable in its effect on the few that violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness
+to public opinion, and felt as if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and
+town paupers,&mdash;with the drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July
+odes, and the broken soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The
+consequence of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that many of my
+readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which I adopted. The idea
+of becoming a wandering story-teller had been suggested, a year or two before,
+by an encounter with several merry vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they
+and I had sheltered ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more
+extravagant than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
+day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering orators
+and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one illustrious
+itinerant in the other hemisphere,&mdash;of Goldsmith, who planned and
+performed his travels through France and Italy on a less promising scheme than
+mine. I took credit to myself for various qualifications, mental and personal,
+suited to the undertaking. Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for
+employment, keeping up an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me
+conscious that I must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my
+chief motives were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
+Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than seen me
+either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit upon a method of
+uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I had written romances
+instead of reciting them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life, intermixed with
+specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great mass of fiction to which I
+gave existence, and which has vanished like cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions
+when I sought a pecuniary reward, I was accustomed to exercise my narrative
+faculty wherever chance had collected a little audience idle enough to listen.
+These rehearsals were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and,
+indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence
+was its own reward, though the hope of praise also became a powerful
+incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought as I did
+then, let me beseech the reader to believe that my tales were not always so
+cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be given a sketch of the
+circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my air-drawn pictures will be
+set in frames perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they
+will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid the lake and
+mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I
+write the book for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may
+profit by, though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller.
+</p>
+
+<h3>A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.</h3>
+
+<p>
+I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise. The day promised to
+be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay along the earth and settled
+in minute globules on the folds of my clothes, so that I looked precisely as if
+touched with a hoar-frost. The sky was quite obscured, and the trees and houses
+invisible till they grew out of the fog as I came close upon them. There is a
+hill towards the west whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level
+course through the village and ascending an eminence on the other side, behind
+which it disappears. The whole view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I
+paused; and, while gazing through the misty veil, it partially rose and swept
+away with so sudden an effect that a gray cloud seemed to have taken the aspect
+of a small white town. A thin vapor being still diffused through the
+atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog, whether hung in air or based on
+earth, appeared not less substantial than the edifices, and gave their own
+indistinctness to the whole. It was singular that such an unromantic scene
+should look so visionary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half of the parson’s dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of it was a
+cloud; but Squire Moody’s mansion, the grandest in the village, was wholly
+visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony under the front window; while in
+another place only two red chimneys were seen above the mist, appertaining to
+my own paternal residence, then tenanted by strangers. I could not remember
+those with whom I had dwelt there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the
+bank was in the clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of
+buildings had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods store of Mr.
+Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike’s tobacco manufactory
+an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian chief in front. The
+white spire of the meeting-house ascended out of the densest heap of vapor, as
+if that shadowy base were its only support: or, to give a truer interpretation,
+the steeple was the emblem of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet
+pointing to a cloudless atmosphere, and catching the brightness of the east on
+its gilded vane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy intervals and a
+border of trees between the wheeltrack and the sidewalks, all so indistinct,
+and not to be traced without an effort, the whole seemed more like memory than
+reality. I would have imagined that years had already passed, and I was far
+away, contemplating that dim picture of my native place, which I should retain
+in my mind through the mist of time. No tears fell from my eyes among the
+dewdrops of the morning; nor does it occur to me that I heaved a sigh. In
+truth, I had never felt such a delicious excitement nor known what freedom was
+till that moment when I gave up my home and took the whole world in exchange,
+fluttering the wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to
+another through the universe. I waved my hand towards the dusky village, bade
+it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path but that which might
+lead me back. Never was Childe Harold’s sentiment adopted in a spirit more
+unlike his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote. Recollecting how the knight and
+Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road to Toboso, I began,
+between jest and earnest, to feel a similar anxiety. It was gratified, and by a
+more poetical phenomenon than the braying of the dappled ass or the neigh of
+Rosinante. The sun, then just above the horizon, shone faintly through the fog,
+and formed a species of rainbow in the west, bestriding my intended road like a
+gigantic portal. I had never known before that a bow could be generated between
+the sunshine and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues,
+but was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar
+rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to which all
+omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway of futurity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred miles of home,
+and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The first precaution was
+reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson Thumpcushion might have put an untimely
+catastrophe to my story; but as nobody would be much affected by my disgrace,
+and all was to be suffered in my own person, I know not why I cared about a
+name. For a week or two I travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any
+guidance except the whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or the green
+bough that beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed its withered finger
+onward. All my care was to be farther from home each night than the preceding
+morning.
+</p>
+
+<h3>A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.</h3>
+
+<p>
+One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud, and
+threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether of tavern,
+cottage, barn, or shady tree. The first which offered itself was a
+wood,&mdash;not a forest, but a trim plantation of young oaks, growing just
+thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out, while they admitted a few
+straggling beams, and thus produced the most cheerful gloom imaginable. A
+brook, so small and clear, and apparently so cool, that I wanted to drink it
+up, ran under the road through a little arch of stone without once meeting the
+sun in its passage from the shade on one side to the shade on the other. As
+there was a stepping-place over the stone wall and a path along the rivulet, I
+followed it and discovered its source,&mdash;a spring gushing out of an old
+barrel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch of a tree, a
+stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on the grassy verge of the
+spring, with his back towards me. He was a slender figure, dressed in black
+broadcloth, which was none of the finest nor very fashionably cut. On hearing
+my footsteps he started up rather nervously, and, turning round, showed the
+face of a young man about my own age, with his finger in a volume which he had
+been reading till my intrusion. His book was evidently a pocket Bible. Though I
+piqued myself at that period on my great penetration into people’s characters
+and pursuits, I could not decide whether this young man in black were an
+unfledged divine from Andover, a college student, or preparing for college at
+some academy. In either case I would quite as willingly have found a merrier
+companion; such, for instance, as the comedian with whom Gil Blas shared his
+dinner beside a fountain in Spain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves, filled and
+emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit the stranger’s
+classical associations, that this beautiful fountain ought to flow from an urn
+instead of an old barrel. He did not show that he understood the allusion, and
+replied very briefly, with a shyness that was quite out of place between
+persons who met in such circumstances. Had he treated my next observation in
+the same way, we should have parted without another word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is very singular,” said I,&mdash;“though doubtless there are good reasons
+for it,&mdash;that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and lavish it
+everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat. Why should not we
+find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a barrel of good liquor at the
+foot of it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There is a loaf of bread on the tree,” replied the stranger, without even
+smiling&mdash;at a coincidence which made me laugh. “I have something to eat in
+my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with me, you shall be welcome.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I accept your offer with pleasure,” said I. “A pilgrim such as I am must not
+refuse a providential meal.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the tree, but now
+turned round and regarded me with great earnestness, coloring deeply at the
+same time. However, he said nothing, and produced part of a loaf of bread and
+some cheese, the former being evidently home baked, though some days out of the
+oven. The fare was good enough, with a real welcome, such as his appeared to
+be. After spreading these articles on the stump of a tree, he proceeded to ask
+a blessing on our food, an unexpected ceremony, and quite an impressive one at
+our woodland table, with the fountain gushing beside us and the bright sky
+glimmering through the boughs; nor did his brief petition affect me less
+because his embarrassment made his voice tremble. At the end of the meal he
+returned thanks with the same tremulous fervor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my necessities, and
+showed it by becoming less reserved. On my part, I professed never to have
+relished a dinner better; and, in requital of the stranger’s hospitality,
+solicited the pleasure of his company to supper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where? At your home?” asked he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” said I, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps our roads are not the same,” observed he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way,” answered I. “This
+morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home to-night; and a moment ago I
+dined at home. To be sure, there was a certain place which I called home; but I
+have resolved not to see it again till I have been quite round the globe and
+enter the street on the east as I left it on the west. In the mean time, I have
+a home everywhere, or nowhere, just as you please to take it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home,” said the young man,
+with solemnity. “We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but it is strange that we
+two should meet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no satisfactory reply.
+But we had eaten salt together, and it was right that we should form
+acquaintance after that ceremony as the Arabs of the desert do, especially as
+he had learned something about myself, and the courtesy of the country entitled
+me to as much information in return. I asked whither he was travelling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not know,” said he; “but God knows.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is strange!” exclaimed I; “not that God should know it, but that you
+should not. And how is your road to be pointed out?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps by an inward conviction,” he replied, looking sideways at me to
+discover whether I smiled; “perhaps by an outward sign.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then, believe me,” said I, “the outward sign is already granted you, and the
+inward conviction ought to follow. We are told of pious men in old times who
+committed themselves to the care of Providence, and saw the manifestation of
+its will in the slightest circumstances, as in the shooting of a star, the
+flight of a bird, or the course taken by some brute animal. Sometimes even a
+stupid ass was their guide. May I not be as good a one?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not know,” said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I partly
+apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit of a stray
+patient. Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my sanity as I did of his,
+though certainly with less justice, since I was fully aware of my own
+extravagances, while he acted as wildly, and deemed it heavenly wisdom. We were
+a singular couple, strikingly contrasted, yet curiously assimilated, each of us
+remarkable enough by himself, and doubly so in the other’s company. Without any
+formal compact, we kept together day after day till our union appeared
+permanent. Even had I seen nothing to love and admire in him, I could never
+have thought of deserting one who needed me continually; for I never knew a
+person; not even a woman, so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he
+was,&mdash;so painfully shy, so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so
+often depressed by a weight within himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before the public.
+A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of relinquishing the immunities of
+a private character, and giving every man, and for money too, the right which
+no man yet possessed, of treating me with open scorn. But about a week after
+contracting the above alliance I made my bow to an audience of nine persons,
+seven of whom hissed me in a very disagreeable manner, and not without good
+cause. Indeed, the failure was so signal that it would have been mere swindling
+to retain the money, which had been paid on my implied contract to give its
+value of amusement. So I called in the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole
+receipts, a mighty sum and was gratified with a round of applause by way of
+offset to the hisses. This event would have looked most horrible in
+anticipation,&mdash;a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or hide
+himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning blush; but the
+reality was not so very hard to bear. It is a fact that I was more deeply
+grieved by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to my companion on the
+same evening. In my own behalf I was angry and excited, not depressed; my blood
+ran quick, my spirits rose buoyantly, and I had never felt such a confidence of
+future success and determination to achieve it as at that trying moment. I
+resolved to persevere, if it were only to wring the reluctant praise from my
+enemies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle trade; now I
+recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole powers cultivated to the
+utmost, and exerted with the same prodigality as if I were speaking for a great
+party or for the nation at large on the floor of the Capitol. No talent or
+attainment could come amiss; everything, indeed, was requisite,&mdash;wide
+observation, varied knowledge, deep thoughts, and sparkling ones; pathos and
+levity, and a mixture of both, like sunshine in a raindrop; lofty imagination,
+veiling itself in the garb of common life; and the practised art which alone
+could render these gifts, and more than these, available. Not that I ever hoped
+to be thus qualified. But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
+impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied, I did
+my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of every defect; and strove,
+with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next attempt. It is one of my
+few sources of pride, that, ridiculous as the object was, I followed it up with
+the firmness and energy of a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and kept them
+ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of the moment; though
+I cannot remember ever to have told a tale which did not vary considerably from
+my preconceived idea, and acquire a novelty of aspect as often as I repeated
+it. Oddly enough, my success was generally in proportion to the difference
+between the conception and accomplishment. I provided two or more commencements
+and catastrophes to many of the tales,&mdash;a happy expedient, suggested by
+the double sets of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the suits in Sir
+Piercy Shafton’s wardrobe. But my best efforts had a unity, a wholeness, and a
+separate character that did not admit of this sort of mechanism.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE VILLAGE THEATRE</h3>
+
+<p>
+About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived at a
+country town, where a small company of actors, on their return from a summer’s
+campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a series of dramatic
+exhibitions. A moderately sized hall of the tavern had been converted into a
+theatre. The performances that evening were, The Heir at Law, and No Song, no
+Supper, with the recitation of Alexander’s Feast between the play and farce.
+The house was thin and dull. But the next day there appeared to be brighter
+prospects, the playbills announcing at every corner, on the town-pump,
+and&mdash;awful sacrilege!&mdash;on the very door of the meeting-house, an
+Unprecedented Attraction! After setting forth the ordinary entertainments of a
+theatre, the public were informed, in the hugest type that the printing-office
+could supply, that the manager had been fortunate enough to accomplish an
+engagement with the celebrated Story-Teller. He would make his first appearance
+that evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe,
+which had been received with rapturous applause by audiences in all the
+principal cities. This outrageous flourish of trumpets, be it known, was wholly
+unauthorized by me, who had merely made an engagement for a single evening,
+without assuming any more celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the
+tale, it could hardly have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet
+an unfilled plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether
+Mr. Higginbotham should live or die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced the
+Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice, in tremulous
+characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the school-house, where, with
+divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would address sinners on the welfare of their
+immortal souls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I took a
+ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion. My spirits were
+good, with a certain glow of mind which I had already learned to depend upon as
+the sure prognostic of success. Passing a small and solitary school-house,
+where a light was burning dimly and a few people were entering the door, I went
+in with them, and saw my friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected about
+fifteen hearers, mostly females. Just as I entered he was beginning to pray in
+accents so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of his
+efforts both with God and man. There was room for distrust in regard to the
+latter. At the conclusion of the prayer several of the little audience went
+out, leaving him to begin his discourse under such discouraging circumstances,
+added to his natural and agonizing diffidence. Knowing that my presence on
+these occasions increased his embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a dusky
+place near the door, and now stole softly out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and, being a
+feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so much the better
+chance for the Story-Teller. The bar was thronged with customers, the
+toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in the hall there was a broad,
+deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of impatient thunder,&mdash;all
+symptoms of all overflowing house and an eager audience. I drank a glass of
+wine-and-water, and stood at the side scene conversing with a young person of
+doubtful sex. If a gentleman, how could he have performed the singing girl the
+night before in No Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why did she enact Young
+Norval, and now wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of
+Little Pickle? In either case the dress was pretty and the wearer bewitching;
+so that, at the proper moment, I stepped forward with a gay heart and a hold
+one; while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded at many a country
+ball, and the curtain, as it rose, discovered something like a country
+bar-room. Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a clarinet;
+but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there, it might have swelled
+in vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted me. The good people of the
+town, knowing that the world contained innumerable persons of celebrity
+undreamed of by them, took it for granted that I was one, and that their roar
+of welcome was but a feeble echo of those which had thundered around me in
+lofty theatres. Such an enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each person seemed
+a Briarcus clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping his feet and several
+cudgels in play with stamping and thumping on the floor; while the ladies
+flourished their white cambric handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow and red
+bandanna, like the flags of different nations. After such a salutation, the
+celebrated Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce so humble an affair as
+Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and afforded
+good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to my shame, did I
+spare. I never knew the “magic of a name” till I used that of Mr. Higginbotham.
+Often as I repeated it, there were louder bursts of merriment than those which
+responded to what, in my opinion, were more legitimate strokes of humor. The
+success of the piece was incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair,
+which Little Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had
+fastened to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the queerest
+gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The audience, supposing
+that some enormous joke was appended to this long tail behind, were ineffably
+delighted, and gave way to such a tumult of approbation that, just as the story
+closed, the benches broke beneath them and left one whole row of my admirers on
+the floor. Even in that predicament they continued their applause. In after
+times, when I had grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example
+how much of fame is humbug; how much the meed of what our better nature blushes
+at; how much an accident; how much bestowed on mistaken principles; and how
+small and poor the remnant. From pit and boxes there was now a universal call
+for the Story-Teller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I left the
+stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given me a letter with the
+postmark of my native village, and directed to my assumed name in the stiff old
+handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion. Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown
+of the Story-Teller, and conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary
+could be no other than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it,
+affected me most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian
+standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the
+players,&mdash;the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy
+girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than modest,&mdash;pointing to these with solemn
+ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type of the austere
+duty, and they of the vanities of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my hand, while
+the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the theatre. Another train of
+thought came over me. The stern old man appeared again, but now with the
+gentleness of sorrow, softening his authority with love as a father might, and
+even bending his venerable head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in
+his own mistaken discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then held the
+letter in the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in
+my mind, and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a style of
+paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation which I could not have resisted
+had I but risked the trial. The thought still haunts me that then I made my
+irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed me to the
+present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in spite of a laudatory
+critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the liberal offers of the manager.
+As we walked onward, following the same road, on two such different errands,
+Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with tears to convince me of the guilt
+and madness of my life.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Passages from a Relinquished Work (From
+“Mosses From An Old Manse”), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Passages from a Relinquished Work (From “Mosses From An Old Manse”)
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9232]
+First Posted: September 6, 2003
+Last Updated: December 14, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSAGES--RELINQUISHED WORK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                 PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK
+
+
+
+AT HOME
+
+From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who
+made me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable
+stripes, using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love,
+between myself and his own three boys.  The result, it must be
+owned, has been very different in their cases and mine, they being
+all respectable men and well settled in life; the eldest as the
+successor to his father’s pulpit, the second as a physician, and the
+third as a partner in a wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better
+prospects than either of them, have run the course which this volume
+will describe.  Yet there is room for doubt whether I should have
+been any better contented with such success as theirs than with my
+own misfortunes,--at least, till after my experience of the latter
+had made it too late for another trial.
+
+My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
+place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
+page as mine.  In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
+hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
+gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
+powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
+pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead
+ones, would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after
+him.  Such pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow
+warm, such slapping with his open palm, thumping with his closed
+fist, and banging with the whole weight of the great Bible,
+convinced me that he held, in imagination, either the Old Nick or
+some Unitarian infidel at bay, and belabored his unhappy cushion as
+proxy for those abominable adversaries.  Nothing but this exercise
+of the body while delivering his sermons could have supported the
+good parson’s health under the mental toil which they cost him in
+composition.
+
+Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it
+a warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I
+suppose, to me.  With late justice, though early enough, even now,
+to be tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a
+good and wise man after his own fashion.  If his management failed
+as to myself, it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly
+say, could any mode of education with which it was possible for him
+to be acquainted have made me much better than what I was or led me
+to a happier fortune than the present. He could neither change the
+nature that God gave me nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my
+peculiar character.  Perhaps it was my chief misfortune that I had
+neither father nor mother alive; for parents have an instinctive
+sagacity in regard to the welfare of their children, and the child
+feels a confidence both in the wisdom and affection of his parents
+which he cannot transfer to any delegate of their duties, however
+conscientious.  An orphan’s fate is hard, be he rich or poor.  As
+for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old gentleman in my
+dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding out his hand
+as if each had something to forgive.  With such kindness and such
+forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
+
+I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible
+levity of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but
+wayward and fanciful.  What a character was this to be brought in
+contact with the stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian!  We were
+at variance on a thousand points; but our chief and final dispute
+arose from the pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a
+particular profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence,
+had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of
+life.  This would have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the
+world; it was fatal in New England.  There is a grossness in the
+conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any
+good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can
+anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies
+physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming,
+but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be satisfied with
+what his father left him.  The principle is excellent in its general
+influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that violate
+it.  I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as if
+it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,--with the
+drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
+soldier who had been good for nothing since last war.  The
+consequence of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
+
+I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
+many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life
+which I adopted.  The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had
+been suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several
+merry vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
+ourselves during a summer shower.  The project was not more
+extravagant than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are
+executed every day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East,
+and the wandering orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I
+had the example of one illustrious itinerant in the other
+hemisphere,--of Goldsmith, who planned and performed his travels
+through France and Italy on a less promising scheme than mine.  I
+took credit to myself for various qualifications, mental and
+personal, suited to the undertaking. Besides, my mind had latterly
+tormented me for employment, keeping up an irregular activity even
+in sleep, and making me conscious that I must toil, if it were but
+in catching butterflies.  But my chief motives were, discontent with
+home and a bitter grudge against Parson Thumpcushion, who would
+rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than seen me either a
+novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit upon a method
+of uniting.  After all, it was not half so foolish as if I had
+written romances instead of reciting them.
+
+The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
+intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
+mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished
+like cloud-shapes.  Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary
+reward, I was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever
+chance had collected a little audience idle enough to listen.  These
+rehearsals were useful in testing the strong points of my stories;
+and, indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that
+its indulgence was its own reward, though the hope of praise also
+became a powerful incitement.  Since I shall never feel the warm
+gush of new thought as I did then, let me beseech the reader to
+believe that my tales were not always so cold as he may find them
+now.  With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances
+in which the story was told.  Thus my air-drawn pictures will be set
+in frames perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since
+they will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid
+the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of
+our native land. But I write the book for the sake of its moral,
+which many a dreaming youth may profit by, though it is the
+experience of a wandering story-teller.
+
+
+
+A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.
+
+I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise.  The day
+promised to be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay
+along the earth and settled in minute globules on the folds of my
+clothes, so that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost.
+The sky was quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible till
+they grew out of the fog as I came close upon them.  There is a hill
+towards the west whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level
+course through the village and ascending an eminence on the other
+side, behind which it disappears.  The whole view comprises an
+extent of half a mile. Here I paused; and, while gazing through the
+misty veil, it partially rose and swept away with so sudden an
+effect that a gray cloud seemed to have taken the aspect of a small
+white town. A thin vapor being still diffused through the
+atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog, whether hung in air or
+based on earth, appeared not less substantial than the edifices, and
+gave their own indistinctness to the whole.  It was singular that
+such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.
+
+Half of the parson’s dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of
+it was a cloud; but Squire Moody’s mansion, the grandest in the
+village, was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony
+under the front window; while in another place only two red chimneys
+were seen above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence,
+then tenanted by strangers.  I could not remember those with whom I
+had dwelt there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank
+was in the clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block
+of buildings had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods
+store of Mr. Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus
+Pike’s tobacco manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid
+image of an Indian chief in front.  The white spire of the meeting-house
+ascended out of the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy
+base were its only support: or, to give a truer interpretation, the
+steeple was the emblem of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet
+pointing to a cloudless atmosphere, and catching the brightness of
+the east on its gilded vane.
+
+As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy
+intervals and a border of trees between the wheeltrack and the
+sidewalks, all so indistinct, and not to be traced without an
+effort, the whole seemed more like memory than reality.  I would
+have imagined that years had already passed, and I was far away,
+contemplating that dim picture of my native place, which I should
+retain in my mind through the mist of time.  No tears fell from my
+eyes among the dewdrops of the morning; nor does it occur to me that
+I heaved a sigh.  In truth, I had never felt such a delicious
+excitement nor known what freedom was till that moment when I gave
+up my home and took the whole world in exchange, fluttering the
+wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to another
+through the universe.  I waved my hand towards the dusky village,
+bade it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path but
+that which might lead me back.  Never was Childe Harold’s sentiment
+adopted in a spirit more unlike his own.
+
+Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote.  Recollecting how the
+knight and Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road
+to Toboso, I began, between jest and earnest, to feel a similar
+anxiety.  It was gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon than
+the braying of the dappled ass or the neigh of Rosinante.  The sun,
+then just above the horizon, shone faintly through the fog, and
+formed a species of rainbow in the west, bestriding my intended road
+like a gigantic portal.  I had never known before that a bow could
+be generated between the sunshine and the morning mist.  It had no
+brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but was a mere unpainted framework,
+as white and ghostlike as the lunar rainbow, which is deemed ominous
+of evil.  But, with a light heart, to which all omens were
+propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway of futurity.
+
+I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred
+miles of home, and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The
+first precaution was reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson
+Thumpcushion might have put an untimely catastrophe to my story; but
+as nobody would be much affected by my disgrace, and all was to be
+suffered in my own person, I know not why I cared about a name.  For
+a week or two I travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any
+guidance except the whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or
+the green bough that beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed
+its withered finger onward.  All my care was to be farther from home
+each night than the preceding morning.
+
+
+
+A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.
+
+One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
+and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether
+of tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree.  The first which offered
+itself was a wood,--not a forest, but a trim plantation of young
+oaks, growing just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out,
+while they admitted a few straggling beams, and thus produced the
+most cheerful gloom imaginable.  A brook, so small and clear, and
+apparently so cool, that I wanted to drink it up, ran under the road
+through a little arch of stone without once meeting the sun in its
+passage from the shade on one side to the shade on the other.  As
+there was a stepping-place over the stone wall and a path along the
+rivulet, I followed it and discovered its source,--a spring gushing
+out of an old barrel.
+
+In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch
+of a tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on
+the grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me.  He was a
+slender figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the
+finest nor very fashionably cut.  On hearing my footsteps he started
+up rather nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young
+man about my own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been
+reading till my intrusion.  His book was evidently a pocket Bible.
+Though I piqued myself at that period on my great penetration into
+people’s characters and pursuits, I could not decide whether this
+young man in black were an unfledged divine from Andover, a college
+student, or preparing for college at some academy.  In either case I
+would quite as willingly have found a merrier companion; such, for
+instance, as the comedian with whom Gil Blas shared his dinner
+beside a fountain in Spain.
+
+After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves,
+filled and emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit
+the stranger’s classical associations, that this beautiful fountain
+ought to flow from an urn instead of an old barrel.  He did not show
+that he understood the allusion, and replied very briefly, with a
+shyness that was quite out of place between persons who met in such
+circumstances.  Had he treated my next observation in the same way,
+we should have parted without another word.
+
+“It is very singular,” said I,--“though doubtless there are good
+reasons for it,--that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and
+lavish it everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat.
+Why should not we find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a
+barrel of good liquor at the foot of it?”
+
+“There is a loaf of bread on the tree,” replied the stranger,
+without even smiling--at a coincidence which made me laugh.  “I have
+something to eat in my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with
+me, you shall be welcome.”
+
+“I accept your offer with pleasure,” said I.  “A pilgrim such as I
+am must not refuse a providential meal.”
+
+The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the
+tree, but now turned round and regarded me with great earnestness,
+coloring deeply at the same time.  However, he said nothing, and
+produced part of a loaf of bread and some cheese, the former being
+evidently home baked, though some days out of the oven.  The fare
+was good enough, with a real welcome, such as his appeared to be.
+After spreading these articles on the stump of a tree, he proceeded
+to ask a blessing on our food, an unexpected ceremony, and quite an
+impressive one at our woodland table, with the fountain gushing
+beside us and the bright sky glimmering through the boughs; nor did
+his brief petition affect me less because his embarrassment made his
+voice tremble.  At the end of the meal he returned thanks with the
+same tremulous fervor.
+
+He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my
+necessities, and showed it by becoming less reserved.  On my part, I
+professed never to have relished a dinner better; and, in requital
+of the stranger’s hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company
+to supper.
+
+“Where?  At your home?”  asked he.
+
+“Yes,” said I, smiling.
+
+“Perhaps our roads are not the same,” observed he.
+
+“O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way,” answered
+I.  “This morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home
+to-night; and a moment ago I dined at home.  To be sure, there was a
+certain place which I called home; but I have resolved not to see it
+again till I have been quite round the globe and enter the street on
+the east as I left it on the west. In the mean time, I have a home
+everywhere, or nowhere, just as you please to take it.”
+
+“Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home,” said the
+young man, with solemnity.  “We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but
+it is strange that we two should meet.”
+
+I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no
+satisfactory reply.  But we had eaten salt together, and it was
+right that we should form acquaintance after that ceremony as the
+Arabs of the desert do, especially as he had learned something about
+myself, and the courtesy of the country entitled me to as much
+information in return.  I asked whither he was travelling.
+
+“I do not know,” said he; “but God knows.”
+
+“That is strange!”  exclaimed I; “not that God should know it, but
+that you should not.  And how is your road to be pointed out?”
+
+“Perhaps by an inward conviction,” he replied, looking sideways at
+me to discover whether I smiled; “perhaps by an outward sign.”
+
+“Then, believe me,” said I, “the outward sign is already granted
+you, and the inward conviction ought to follow.  We are told of
+pious men in old times who committed themselves to the care of
+Providence, and saw the manifestation of its will in the slightest
+circumstances, as in the shooting of a star, the flight of a bird,
+or the course taken by some brute animal.  Sometimes even a stupid
+ass was their guide.  May I not be as good a one?”
+
+“I do not know,” said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.
+
+We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I
+partly apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit
+of a stray patient.  Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my
+sanity as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since I
+was fully aware of my own extravagances, while he acted as wildly,
+and deemed it heavenly wisdom.  We were a singular couple,
+strikingly contrasted, yet curiously assimilated, each of us
+remarkable enough by himself, and doubly so in the other’s company.
+Without any formal compact, we kept together day after day till our
+union appeared permanent.  Even had I seen nothing to love and
+admire in him, I could never have thought of deserting one who
+needed me continually; for I never knew a person; not even a woman,
+so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was,--so painfully shy,
+so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so often depressed by
+a weight within himself.
+
+I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before
+the public.  A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of
+relinquishing the immunities of a private character, and giving
+every man, and for money too, the right which no man yet possessed,
+of treating me with open scorn.  But about a week after contracting
+the above alliance I made my bow to an audience of nine persons,
+seven of whom hissed me in a very disagreeable manner, and not
+without good cause.  Indeed, the failure was so signal that it would
+have been mere swindling to retain the money, which had been paid on
+my implied contract to give its value of amusement.  So I called in
+the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole receipts, a mighty sum and
+was gratified with a round of applause by way of offset to
+the hisses.  This event would have looked most horrible in
+anticipation,--a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or
+hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning
+blush; but the reality was not so very hard to bear.  It is a fact
+that I was more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune
+which happened to my companion on the same evening.  In my own
+behalf I was angry and excited, not depressed; my blood ran quick,
+my spirits rose buoyantly, and I had never felt such a confidence of
+future success and determination to achieve it as at that trying
+moment. I resolved to persevere, if it were only to wring the
+reluctant praise from my enemies.
+
+Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle
+trade; now I recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole
+powers cultivated to the utmost, and exerted with the same
+prodigality as if I were speaking for a great party or for the
+nation at large on the floor of the Capitol.  No talent or
+attainment could come amiss; everything, indeed, was requisite,--wide
+observation, varied knowledge, deep thoughts, and sparkling
+ones; pathos and levity, and a mixture of both, like sunshine in a
+raindrop; lofty imagination, veiling itself in the garb of common
+life; and the practised art which alone could render these gifts,
+and more than these, available.  Not that I ever hoped to be thus
+qualified.  But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
+impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be
+satisfied, I did my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of
+every defect; and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them
+in the next attempt.  It is one of my few sources of pride, that,
+ridiculous as the object was, I followed it up with the firmness and
+energy of a man.
+
+I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and
+kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration
+of the moment; though I cannot remember ever to have told a tale
+which did not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and
+acquire a novelty of aspect as often as I repeated it. Oddly enough,
+my success was generally in proportion to the difference between the
+conception and accomplishment.  I provided two or more commencements
+and catastrophes to many of the tales,--a happy expedient, suggested
+by the double sets of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the
+suits in Sir Piercy Shafton’s wardrobe.  But my best efforts had a
+unity, a wholeness, and a separate character that did not admit of
+this sort of mechanism.
+
+
+
+THE VILLAGE THEATRE
+
+About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived
+at a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return
+from a summer’s campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a
+series of dramatic exhibitions.  A moderately sized hall of the
+tavern had been converted into a theatre.  The performances that
+evening were, The Heir at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the
+recitation of Alexander’s Feast between the play and farce.  The
+house was thin and dull.  But the next day there appeared to be
+brighter prospects, the playbills announcing at every corner, on the
+town-pump, and--awful sacrilege!--on the very door of the meeting-house,
+an Unprecedented Attraction! After setting forth the ordinary
+entertainments of a theatre, the public were informed, in the hugest
+type that the printing-office could supply, that the manager had
+been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement with the
+celebrated Story-Teller.  He would make his first appearance that
+evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s
+Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
+audiences in all the principal cities.  This outrageous flourish of
+trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
+made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
+celebrity than the little I possessed.  As for the tale, it could
+hardly have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an
+unfilled plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided
+whether Mr. Higginbotham should live or die.
+
+In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
+the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice,
+in tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
+school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
+address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.
+
+In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
+took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion.
+My spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had
+already learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success.
+Passing a small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning
+dimly and a few people were entering the door, I went in with them,
+and saw my friend Eliakim at the desk.  He had collected about
+fifteen hearers, mostly females.  Just as I entered he was beginning
+to pray in accents so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt
+the reception of his efforts both with God and man.  There was room
+for distrust in regard to the latter.  At the conclusion of the
+prayer several of the little audience went out, leaving him to begin
+his discourse under such discouraging circumstances, added to his
+natural and agonizing diffidence.  Knowing that my presence on these
+occasions increased his embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a
+dusky place near the door, and now stole softly out.
+
+On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
+being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
+much the better chance for the Story-Teller.  The bar was thronged
+with customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in
+the hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional
+peal of impatient thunder,--all symptoms of all overflowing house
+and an eager audience.  I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood
+at the side scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex.
+If a gentleman, how could he have performed the singing girl the
+night before in No Song, no Supper?  Or, if a lady, why did she
+enact Young Norval, and now wear a green coat and white pantaloons
+in the character of Little Pickle?  In either case the dress was
+pretty and the wearer bewitching; so that, at the proper moment, I
+stepped forward with a gay heart and a hold one; while the orchestra
+played a tune that had resounded at many a country ball, and the
+curtain, as it rose, discovered something like a country bar-room.
+Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a tale.
+
+The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
+clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there,
+it might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that
+greeted me.  The good people of the town, knowing that the world
+contained innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them,
+took it for granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome
+was but a feeble echo of those which had thundered around me in
+lofty theatres.  Such an enthusiastic uproar was never heard.  Each
+person seemed a Briarcus clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping
+his feet and several cudgels in play with stamping and thumping on
+the floor; while the ladies flourished their white cambric
+handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow and red bandanna, like the
+flags of different nations. After such a salutation, the celebrated
+Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce so humble an affair as
+Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.
+
+This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
+afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to
+my shame, did I spare.  I never knew the “magic of a name” till I
+used that of Mr. Higginbotham.  Often as I repeated it, there were
+louder bursts of merriment than those which responded to what, in my
+opinion, were more legitimate strokes of humor.  The success of the
+piece was incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which
+Little Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had
+fastened to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the
+queerest gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine.  The
+audience, supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this
+long tail behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a
+tumult of approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches
+broke beneath them and left one whole row of my admirers on the
+floor.  Even in that predicament they continued their applause.  In
+after times, when I had grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene
+for an example how much of fame is humbug; how much the meed of what
+our better nature blushes at; how much an accident; how much
+bestowed on mistaken principles; and how small and poor the remnant.
+From pit and boxes there was now a universal call for the Story-Teller.
+
+That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him.  As I
+left the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given
+me a letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to
+my assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
+Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
+conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no
+other than his lost ward.  His epistle, though I never read it,
+affected me most painfully.  I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of
+my guardian standing among the fripperies of the theatre and
+pointing to the players,--the fantastic and effeminate men, the
+painted women, the giddy girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than
+modest,--pointing to these with solemn ridicule, and eying me with
+stern rebuke.  His image was a type of the austere duty, and they of
+the vanities of life.
+
+I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
+hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
+theatre.  Another train of thought came over me.  The stern old man
+appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
+authority with love as a father might, and even bending his
+venerable head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his
+own mistaken discipline.  I strode twice across the chamber, then
+held the letter in the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume
+unread.  It is fixed in my mind, and was so at the time, that he had
+addressed me in a style of paternal wisdom, and love, and
+reconciliation which I could not have resisted had I but risked the
+trial.  The thought still haunts me that then I made my irrevocable
+choice between good and evil fate.
+
+Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed
+me to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in
+spite of a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the
+liberal offers of the manager.  As we walked onward, following the
+same road, on two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit,
+and labored with tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my
+life.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Passages from a Relinquished Work
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+Project Gutenberg EBook, Passages From a Relinquised Work, by Hawthorne
+From "Mosses From An Old Manse"
+#59 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+Title: Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: Nov, 2005  [EBook #9232]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2003]
+[Last updated on February 6, 2007]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A RELINQUISHED WORK ***
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+This eBook was produced by David Widger
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+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                 PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK
+
+
+
+AT HOME
+
+From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who
+made me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable
+stripes, using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love,
+between myself and his own three boys.  The result, it must be
+owned, has been very different in their cases and mine, they being
+all respectable men and well settled in life; the eldest as the
+successor to his father's pulpit, the second as a physician, and the
+third as a partner in a wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better
+prospects than either of them, have run the course which this volume
+will describe.  Yet there is room for doubt whether I should have
+been any better contented with such success as theirs than with my
+own misfortunes,--at least, till after my experience of the latter
+had made it too late for another trial.
+
+My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
+place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
+page as mine.  In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
+hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
+gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
+powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
+pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead
+ones, would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after
+him.  Such pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow
+warm, such slapping with his open palm, thumping with his closed
+fist, and banging with the whole weight of the great Bible,
+convinced me that he held, in imagination, either the Old Nick or
+some Unitarian infidel at bay, and belabored his unhappy cushion as
+proxy for those abominable adversaries.  Nothing but this exercise
+of the body while delivering his sermons could have supported the
+good parson's health under the mental toil which they cost him in
+composition.
+
+Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it
+a warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I
+suppose, to me.  With late justice, though early enough, even now,
+to be tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a
+good and wise man after his own fashion.  If his management failed
+as to myself, it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly
+say, could any mode of education with which it was possible for him
+to be acquainted have made me much better than what I was or led me
+to a happier fortune than the present. He could neither change the
+nature that God gave me nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my
+peculiar character.  Perhaps it was my chief misfortune that I had
+neither father nor mother alive; for parents have an instinctive
+sagacity in regard to the welfare of their children, and the child
+feels a confidence both in the wisdom and affection of his parents
+which he cannot transfer to any delegate of their duties, however
+conscientious.  An orphan's fate is hard, be he rich or poor.  As
+for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old gentleman in my
+dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding out his hand
+as if each had something to forgive.  With such kindness and such
+forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
+
+I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible
+levity of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but
+wayward and fanciful.  What a character was this to be brought in
+contact with the stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian!  We were
+at variance on a thousand points; but our chief and final dispute
+arose from the pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a
+particular profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence,
+had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of
+life.  This would have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the
+world; it was fatal in New England.  There is a grossness in the
+conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any
+good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can
+anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies
+physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming,
+but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be satisfied with
+what his father left him.  The principle is excellent in its general
+influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that violate
+it.  I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as if
+it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,--with the
+drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
+soldier who had been good for nothing since last war.  The
+consequence of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
+
+I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
+many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life
+which I adopted.  The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had
+been suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several
+merry vagabonds in a showman's wagon, where they and I had sheltered
+ourselves during a summer shower.  The project was not more
+extravagant than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are
+executed every day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East,
+and the wandering orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I
+had the example of one illustrious itinerant in the other
+hemisphere,--of Goldsmith, who planned and performed his travels
+through France and Italy on a less promising scheme than mine.  I
+took credit to myself for various qualifications, mental and
+personal, suited to the undertaking. Besides, my mind had latterly
+tormented me for employment, keeping up an irregular activity even
+in sleep, and making me conscious that I must toil, if it were but
+in catching butterflies.  But my chief motives were, discontent with
+home and a bitter grudge against Parson Thumpcushion, who would
+rather have laid me in my father's tomb than seen me either a
+novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit upon a method
+of uniting.  After all, it was not half so foolish as if I had
+written romances instead of reciting them.
+
+The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
+intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
+mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished
+like cloud-shapes.  Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary
+reward, I was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever
+chance had collected a little audience idle enough to listen.  These
+rehearsals were useful in testing the strong points of my stories;
+and, indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that
+its indulgence was its own reward, though the hope of praise also
+became a powerful incitement.  Since I shall never feel the warm
+gush of new thought as I did then, let me beseech the reader to
+believe that my tales were not always so cold as he may find them
+now.  With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances
+in which the story was told.  Thus my air-drawn pictures will be set
+in frames perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since
+they will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid
+the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of
+our native land. But I write the book for the sake of its moral,
+which many a dreaming youth may profit by, though it is the
+experience of a wandering story-teller.
+
+
+
+A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.
+
+I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise.  The day
+promised to be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay
+along the earth and settled in minute globules on the folds of my
+clothes, so that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost.
+The sky was quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible till
+they grew out of the fog as I came close upon them.  There is a hill
+towards the west whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level
+course through the village and ascending an eminence on the other
+side, behind which it disappears.  The whole view comprises an
+extent of half a mile. Here I paused; and, while gazing through the
+misty veil, it partially rose and swept away with so sudden an
+effect that a gray cloud seemed to have taken the aspect of a small
+white town. A thin vapor being still diffused through the
+atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog, whether hung in air or
+based on earth, appeared not less substantial than the edifices, and
+gave their own indistinctness to the whole.  It was singular that
+such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.
+
+Half of the parson's dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of
+it was a cloud; but Squire Moody's mansion, the grandest in the
+village, was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony
+under the front window; while in another place only two red chimneys
+were seen above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence,
+then tenanted by strangers.  I could not remember those with whom I
+had dwelt there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank
+was in the clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block
+of buildings had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods
+store of Mr. Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus
+Pike's tobacco manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid
+image of an Indian chief in front.  The white spire of the meeting-
+house ascended out of the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy
+base were its only support: or, to give a truer interpretation, the
+steeple was the emblem of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet
+pointing to a cloudless atmosphere, and catching the brightness of
+the east on its gilded vane.
+
+As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy
+intervals and a border of trees between the wheeltrack and the
+sidewalks, all so indistinct, and not to be traced without an
+effort, the whole seemed more like memory than reality.  I would
+have imagined that years had already passed, and I was far away,
+contemplating that dim picture of my native place, which I should
+retain in my mind through the mist of time.  No tears fell from my
+eyes among the dewdrops of the morning; nor does it occur to me that
+I heaved a sigh.  In truth, I had never felt such a delicious
+excitement nor known what freedom was till that moment when I gave
+up my home and took the whole world in exchange, fluttering the
+wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to another
+through the universe.  I waved my hand towards the dusky village,
+bade it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path but
+that which might lead me back.  Never was Childe Harold's sentiment
+adopted in a spirit more unlike his own.
+
+Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote.  Recollecting how the
+knight and Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road
+to Toboso, I began, between jest and earnest, to feel a similar
+anxiety.  It was gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon than
+the braying of the dappled ass or the neigh of Rosinante.  The sun,
+then just above the horizon, shone faintly through the fog, and
+formed a species of rainbow in the west, bestriding my intended road
+like a gigantic portal.  I had never known before that a bow could
+be generated between the sunshine and the morning mist.  It had no
+brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but was a mere unpainted framework,
+as white and ghostlike as the lunar rainbow, which is deemed ominous
+of evil.  But, with a light heart, to which all omens were
+propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway of futurity.
+
+I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred
+miles of home, and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The
+first precaution was reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson
+Thumpcushion might have put an untimely catastrophe to my story; but
+as nobody would be much affected by my disgrace, and all was to be
+suffered in my own person, I know not why I cared about a name.  For
+a week or two I travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any
+guidance except the whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or
+the green bough that beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed
+its withered finger onward.  All my care was to be farther from home
+each night than the preceding morning.
+
+
+
+A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.
+
+One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
+and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether
+of tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree.  The first which offered
+itself was a wood,--not a forest, but a trim plantation of young
+oaks, growing just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out,
+while they admitted a few straggling beams, and thus produced the
+most cheerful gloom imaginable.  A brook, so small and clear, and
+apparently so cool, that I wanted to drink it up, ran under the road
+through a little arch of stone without once meeting the sun in its
+passage from the shade on one side to the shade on the other.  As
+there was a stepping-place over the stone wall and a path along the
+rivulet, I followed it and discovered its source,--a spring gushing
+out of an old barrel.
+
+In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch
+of a tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on
+the grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me.  He was a
+slender figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the
+finest nor very fashionably cut.  On hearing my footsteps he started
+up rather nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young
+man about my own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been
+reading till my intrusion.  His book was evidently a pocket Bible.
+Though I piqued myself at that period on my great penetration into
+people's characters and pursuits, I could not decide whether this
+young man in black were an unfledged divine from Andover, a college
+student, or preparing for college at some academy.  In either case I
+would quite as willingly have found a merrier companion; such, for
+instance, as the comedian with whom Gil Blas shared his dinner
+beside a fountain in Spain.
+
+After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves,
+filled and emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit
+the stranger's classical associations, that this beautiful fountain
+ought to flow from an urn instead of an old barrel.  He did not show
+that he understood the allusion, and replied very briefly, with a
+shyness that was quite out of place between persons who met in such
+circumstances.  Had he treated my next observation in the same way,
+we should have parted without another word.
+
+"It is very singular," said I,--"though doubtless there are good
+reasons for it,--that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and
+lavish it everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat.
+Why should not we find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a
+barrel of good liquor at the foot of it?"
+
+"There is a loaf of bread on the tree," replied the stranger,
+without even smiling--at a coincidence which made me laugh.  "I have
+something to eat in my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with
+me, you shall be welcome."
+
+"I accept your offer with pleasure," said I.  "A pilgrim such as I
+am must not refuse a providential meal."
+
+The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the
+tree, but now turned round and regarded me with great earnestness,
+coloring deeply at the same time.  However, he said nothing, and
+produced part of a loaf of bread and some cheese, the former being
+evidently home baked, though some days out of the oven.  The fare
+was good enough, with a real welcome, such as his appeared to be.
+After spreading these articles on the stump of a tree, he proceeded
+to ask a blessing on our food, an unexpected ceremony, and quite an
+impressive one at our woodland table, with the fountain gushing
+beside us and the bright sky glimmering through the boughs; nor did
+his brief petition affect me less because his embarrassment made his
+voice tremble.  At the end of the meal he returned thanks with the
+same tremulous fervor.
+
+He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my
+necessities, and showed it by becoming less reserved.  On my part, I
+professed never to have relished a dinner better; and, in requital
+of the stranger's hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company
+to supper.
+
+"Where?  At your home?"  asked he.
+
+"Yes," said I, smiling.
+
+"Perhaps our roads are not the same," observed he.
+
+"O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way," answered
+I.  "This morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home
+to-night; and a moment ago I dined at home.  To be sure, there was a
+certain place which I called home; but I have resolved not to see it
+again till I have been quite round the globe and enter the street on
+the east as I left it on the west. In the mean time, I have a home
+everywhere, or nowhere, just as you please to take it."
+
+"Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home," said the
+young man, with solemnity.  "We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but
+it is strange that we two should meet."
+
+I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no
+satisfactory reply.  But we had eaten salt together, and it was
+right that we should form acquaintance after that ceremony as the
+Arabs of the desert do, especially as he had learned something about
+myself, and the courtesy of the country entitled me to as much
+information in return.  I asked whither he was travelling.
+
+"I do not know," said he; "but God knows."
+
+"That is strange!"  exclaimed I; "not that God should know it, but
+that you should not.  And how is your road to be pointed out?"
+
+"Perhaps by an inward conviction," he replied, looking sideways at
+me to discover whether I smiled; "perhaps by an outward sign."
+
+"Then, believe me," said I, "the outward sign is already granted
+you, and the inward conviction ought to follow.  We are told of
+pious men in old times who committed themselves to the care of
+Providence, and saw the manifestation of its will in the slightest
+circumstances, as in the shooting of a star, the flight of a bird,
+or the course taken by some brute animal.  Sometimes even a stupid
+ass was their guide.  May I not be as good a one?"
+
+"I do not know," said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.
+
+We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I
+partly apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit
+of a stray patient.  Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my
+sanity as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since I
+was fully aware of my own extravagances, while he acted as wildly,
+and deemed it heavenly wisdom.  We were a singular couple,
+strikingly contrasted, yet curiously assimilated, each of us
+remarkable enough by himself, and doubly so in the other's company.
+Without any formal compact, we kept together day after day till our
+union appeared permanent.  Even had I seen nothing to love and
+admire in him, I could never have thought of deserting one who
+needed me continually; for I never knew a person; not even a woman,
+so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was,--so painfully shy,
+so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so often depressed by
+a weight within himself.
+
+I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before
+the public.  A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of
+relinquishing the immunities of a private character, and giving
+every man, and for money too, the right which no man yet possessed,
+of treating me with open scorn.  But about a week after contracting
+the above alliance I made my bow to an audience of nine persons,
+seven of whom hissed me in a very disagreeable manner, and not
+without good cause.  Indeed, the failure was so signal that it would
+have been mere swindling to retain the money, which had been paid on
+my implied contract to give its value of amusement.  So I called in
+the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole receipts, a mighty sum and
+was gratified with a round of applause by way of offset to
+the hisses.  This event would have looked most horrible in
+anticipation,--a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or
+hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning
+blush; but the reality was not so very hard to bear.  It is a fact
+that I was more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune
+which happened to my companion on the same evening.  In my own
+behalf I was angry and excited, not depressed; my blood ran quick,
+my spirits rose buoyantly, and I had never felt such a confidence of
+future success and determination to achieve it as at that trying
+moment. I resolved to persevere, if it were only to wring the
+reluctant praise from my enemies.
+
+Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle
+trade; now I recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole
+powers cultivated to the utmost, and exerted with the same
+prodigality as if I were speaking for a great party or for the
+nation at large on the floor of the Capitol.  No talent or
+attainment could come amiss; everything, indeed, was requisite,--
+wide observation, varied knowledge, deep thoughts, and sparkling
+ones; pathos and levity, and a mixture of both, like sunshine in a
+raindrop; lofty imagination, veiling itself in the garb of common
+life; and the practised art which alone could render these gifts,
+and more than these, available.  Not that I ever hoped to be thus
+qualified.  But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
+impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be
+satisfied, I did my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of
+every defect; and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them
+in the next attempt.  It is one of my few sources of pride, that,
+ridiculous as the object was, I followed it up with the firmness and
+energy of a man.
+
+I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and
+kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration
+of the moment; though I cannot remember ever to have told a tale
+which did not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and
+acquire a novelty of aspect as often as I repeated it. Oddly enough,
+my success was generally in proportion to the difference between the
+conception and accomplishment.  I provided two or more commencements
+and catastrophes to many of the tales,--a happy expedient, suggested
+by the double sets of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the
+suits in Sir Piercy Shafton's wardrobe.  But my best efforts had a
+unity, a wholeness, and a separate character that did not admit of
+this sort of mechanism.
+
+
+
+THE VILLAGE THEATRE
+
+About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived
+at a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return
+from a summer's campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a
+series of dramatic exhibitions.  A moderately sized hall of the
+tavern had been converted into a theatre.  The performances that
+evening were, The Heir at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the
+recitation of Alexander's Feast between the play and farce.  The
+house was thin and dull.  But the next day there appeared to be
+brighter prospects, the playbills announcing at every corner, on the
+town-pump, and--awful sacrilege!--on the very door of the meeting-
+house, an Unprecedented Attraction! After setting forth the ordinary
+entertainments of a theatre, the public were informed, in the hugest
+type that the printing-office could supply, that the manager had
+been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement with the
+celebrated Story-Teller.  He would make his first appearance that
+evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham's
+Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
+audiences in all the principal cities.  This outrageous flourish of
+trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
+made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
+celebrity than the little I possessed.  As for the tale, it could
+hardly have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an
+unfilled plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided
+whether Mr. Higginbotham should live or die.
+
+In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
+the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice,
+in tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
+school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
+address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.
+
+In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
+took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion.
+My spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had
+already learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success.
+Passing a small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning
+dimly and a few people were entering the door, I went in with them,
+and saw my friend Eliakim at the desk.  He had collected about
+fifteen hearers, mostly females.  Just as I entered he was beginning
+to pray in accents so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt
+the reception of his efforts both with God and man.  There was room
+for distrust in regard to the latter.  At the conclusion of the
+prayer several of the little audience went out, leaving him to begin
+his discourse under such discouraging circumstances, added to his
+natural and agonizing diffidence.  Knowing that my presence on these
+occasions increased his embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a
+dusky place near the door, and now stole softly out.
+
+On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
+being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
+much the better chance for the Story-Teller.  The bar was thronged
+with customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in
+the hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional
+peal of impatient thunder,--all symptoms of all overflowing house
+and an eager audience.  I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood
+at the side scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex.
+If a gentleman, how could he have performed the singing girl the
+night before in No Song, no Supper?  Or, if a lady, why did she
+enact Young Norval, and now wear a green coat and white pantaloons
+in the character of Little Pickle?  In either case the dress was
+pretty and the wearer bewitching; so that, at the proper moment, I
+stepped forward with a gay heart and a hold one; while the orchestra
+played a tune that had resounded at many a country ball, and the
+curtain, as it rose, discovered something like a country bar-room.
+Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a tale.
+
+The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
+clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there,
+it might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that
+greeted me.  The good people of the town, knowing that the world
+contained innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them,
+took it for granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome
+was but a feeble echo of those which had thundered around me in
+lofty theatres.  Such an enthusiastic uproar was never heard.  Each
+person seemed a Briarcus clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping
+his feet and several cudgels in play with stamping and thumping on
+the floor; while the ladies flourished their white cambric
+handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow and red bandanna, like the
+flags of different nations. After such a salutation, the celebrated
+Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce so humble an affair as
+Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe.
+
+This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
+afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to
+my shame, did I spare.  I never knew the "magic of a name" till I
+used that of Mr. Higginbotham.  Often as I repeated it, there were
+louder bursts of merriment than those which responded to what, in my
+opinion, were more legitimate strokes of humor.  The success of the
+piece was incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which
+Little Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had
+fastened to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the
+queerest gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine.  The
+audience, supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this
+long tail behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a
+tumult of approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches
+broke beneath them and left one whole row of my admirers on the
+floor.  Even in that predicament they continued their applause.  In
+after times, when I had grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene
+for an example how much of fame is humbug; how much the meed of what
+our better nature blushes at; how much an accident; how much
+bestowed on mistaken principles; and how small and poor the remnant.
+From pit and boxes there was now a universal call for the Story-
+Teller.
+
+That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him.  As I
+left the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given
+me a letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to
+my assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
+Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
+conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no
+other than his lost ward.  His epistle, though I never read it,
+affected me most painfully.  I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of
+my guardian standing among the fripperies of the theatre and
+pointing to the players,--the fantastic and effeminate men, the
+painted women, the giddy girl in boy's clothes, merrier than
+modest,--pointing to these with solemn ridicule, and eying me with
+stern rebuke.  His image was a type of the austere duty, and they of
+the vanities of life.
+
+I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
+hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
+theatre.  Another train of thought came over me.  The stern old man
+appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
+authority with love as a father might, and even bending his
+venerable head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his
+own mistaken discipline.  I strode twice across the chamber, then
+held the letter in the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume
+unread.  It is fixed in my mind, and was so at the time, that he had
+addressed me in a style of paternal wisdom, and love, and
+reconciliation which I could not have resisted had I but risked the
+trial.  The thought still haunts me that then I made my irrevocable
+choice between good and evil fate.
+
+Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed
+me to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in
+spite of a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the
+liberal offers of the manager.  As we walked onward, following the
+same road, on two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit,
+and labored with tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my
+life.
+
+
+
+
+
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