The old paths around Lake Makheenac, Shadow Brook, and Tanglewood will ever be associated with the second of Hawthorne's great romances- The House of Seven Gables; written during that first happy autumn at Lenox, it followed closely on the publication of the Scarlet Letter, composed during the dark, pinched days after the author's dismissal from the Salem custom-house.

Possessing Hawthorne's journal and letters, one may follow him down through his apple-orchard to the pretty glen between the house and the lake. Picture "the silent man" walking along the twilight road each evening to a neighbor's, carrying a tin pail for milk, the boy Julian darting across the "milky way" like a humming-bird, and little Una trudging after; or ascending Bald-Summit with the children for a frolic and a wonder-story.
Hawthorne writes:

" Una and Julian grow apace, and so do our chickens. . . . There is a difficulty about these chickens, as well as about the old fowls. We have become so intimately acquainted with every individual of them that it really seems like cannibalism to think of eating them. What is to be done? " It is quite probable that fowls, flowers, and vegetables of the Red-house establishment -were studies for Phoebe's garden favorites in The House of Seven Gables. [1]

Hawthorne, after a year, began to weary of the hills, which he says stereotype themselves on the brain; the secret of his discontent was a hunger for the placid slopes and a glimpse of the beseeching sea, his birthright. Neither Longfellow, Hawthorne, nor Aldrich, each born in an old town by the sea, could allow himself to be far from the salt tang, the flavor of boyish dreams; in his native port, at each lane's ending, is the white-winged fleet, whose pinions would take far man's "restless fancy." Aldrich voices the long, long thoughts of the youth of all three:

I leave behind me the elm-shadowed square
And carven portals of the silent street,
And wander on with listless, vagrant feet,
Through seaward-leading alleys, till the air
Smells of the sea, and straightway then the care
Slips from my heart, and life once more is sweet."

It is the glory of Massachusetts that her children do not need to step without her borders to know the charms, of wooded crags and the boundless sea, of both old King Greylock and rock-bound Nahant.1

Perhaps the last pages Hawthorne wrote on the shores of the lake were his luminous Dedication to the Twice-Told Tales (dated at Lenox, November 1, 1851).

In that deliciously personal and shyly characteristic epistle to "My Dedicatee" Horatio Bridge, Esq., U. S. N. (afterward Paymaster-general), Hawthorne recalls to his college-mate that they were once two idle lads at a country college, gathering blueberries, in study hours, under those tall academic pines, or watching great logs; as, they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; and says: " If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. " The near-by pines at High-Wood no doubt recalled those at Bowdoin. These " Hawthorne Pines," as beautiful as any in the world, belonged to the Sergeant family of Stockbridge.

Twenty days, later, in a storm of snow and sleet, Hawthorne left Lenox. It must indeed have been a droll emigration; Una, Julian, and Rose waved a lingering good-bye to their hens with the Christian names, while five pet cats trailed behind the farmer's wagon as it clattered down the road.

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