mean to come to Boston soon, not for a week but for a single day, and then I can talk about my sanitary prospects more freely than I choose to write.  I am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to be realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come.  If I could but go to England now, I think that the sea voyage and the ‘Old Home’ might set me all right.

    “This letter is for your own eye, and I wish especially that no echo
    of it may come back in your notes to me.

    “P.S.  Give my kindest regards to Mrs. F——­, and tell her that one
    of my choicest ideal places is her drawing-room, and therefore I
    seldom visit it.”

On Monday, the 28th of March, Hawthorne came to town and made my house his first station on a journey to the South for health.  I was greatly shocked at his invalid appearance, and he seemed quite deaf.  The light in his eye was beautiful as ever, but his limbs seemed shrunken and his usual stalwart vigor utterly gone.  He said to me with a pathetic voice, “Why does Nature treat us like little children!  I think we could bear it all if we knew our fate; at least it would not make much difference to me now what became of me.”  Toward night he brightened up a little, and his delicious wit flashed out, at intervals, as of old; but he was evidently broken and dispirited about his health.  Looking out on the bay that was sparkling in the moonlight, he said he thought the moon rather lost something of its charm for him as he grew older.  He spoke with great delight of a little story, called “Pet Marjorie,” and said he had read it carefully through twice, every word of it.  He had much to say about England, and observed, among other things, that “the extent over which her dominions are spread leads her to fancy herself stronger than she really is; but she is not to-day a powerful empire; she is much like a squash-vine, which runs over a whole garden, but, if you cut it at the root, it is at once destroyed.”  At breakfast, next morning, he spoke of his kind neighbors in Concord, and said Alcott was one of the most excellent men he had ever known.  “It is impossible to quarrel with him, for he would take all your harsh words like a saint.”

He left us shortly after this for a journey to Washington, with his friend Mr. Ticknor.  The travellers spent several days in New York, and then proceeded to Philadelphia.  Hawthorne wrote to me from the Continental Hotel, dating his letter “Saturday evening,” announcing the severe illness of his companion.  He did not seem to anticipate a fatal result, but on Sunday morning the news came that Mr. Ticknor was dead.  Hawthorne returned at once to Boston, and stayed here over night.  He was in a very excited and nervous state, and talked incessantly of the sad scenes he had just been passing through.  We sat late together, conversing of the friend we had lost, and I am sure he hardly closed his eyes that night.  In the morning he went back to his own home in Concord.