airy tongues of sirens, stewed ibis, livers of Roman Capitol geese, the wings of a Phoenix not too much done, love-lorn nightingales cooked briskly over Aladdin’s lamp, chicken-pies made of fowls raised by Mrs. Carey, Nautilus chowder, and the like.  Fruit, by all means, should always be taken by an uneasy victim at sea, especially Atalanta pippins and purple grapes raised by Bacchus & Co.  Examining my garments one day as I lay on deck, he thought I was not warmly enough clad, and he recommended, before I took another voyage, that I should fit myself out in Liverpool with a good warm shirt from the shop of Nessus & Co. in Bold Street, where I could also find stout seven-league boots to keep out the damp.  He knew another shop, he said, where I could buy raven-down stockings, and sable clouds with a silver lining, most warm and comfortable for a sea voyage.

His own appetite was excellent, and day after day he used to come on deck after dinner and describe to me what he had eaten.  Of course his accounts were always exaggerations, for my amusement.  I remember one night he gave me a running catalogue of what food he had partaken during the day, and the sum total was convulsing from its absurdity.  Among the viands he had consumed, I remember he stated there were “several yards of steak,” and a “whole warrenful of Welsh rabbits.”  The “divine spirit of Humor” was upon him during many of those days at sea, and he revelled in it like a careless child.

That was a voyage, indeed, long to be remembered, and I shall ever look back upon it as the most satisfactory “sea turn” I ever happened to experience.  I have sailed many a weary, watery mile since then, but Hawthorne was not on board!

The summer after his arrival home he spent quietly in Concord, at the Wayside, and illness in his family made him at times unusually sad.  In one of his notes to me he says:—­

“I am continually reminded nowadays of a response which I once heard a drunken sailor make to a pious gentleman, who asked him how he felt, ‘Pretty d—­d miserable, thank God!’ It very well expresses my thorough discomfort and forced acquiescence.”

Occasionally he wrote requesting me to make a change, here and there, in the new edition of his works then passing through the press.  On the 23d of September, 1860, he writes:—­

“Please to append the following note to the foot of the page, at the commencement of the story called ‘Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,’ in the ‘Twice-Told Tales’:  ’In an English Review, not long since, I have been accused of plagiarizing the idea of this story from a chapter in one of the novels of Alexandra Dumas.  There has undoubtedly been a plagiarism, on one side or the other; but as my story was written a good deal more than twenty years ago, and as the novel is of considerably more recent date, I take pleasure in thinking that M. Dumas has done me the honor to appropriate one of the fanciful conceptions