ing sat down in the nearest chair, without uttering a word. Mrs. Hawthorne asked him if he was well.
"Well enough," was the answer.
"What is the matter, then?" said she. "Are you 'decapitated'?"
He replied with gloom that he was, and that the occurrence was no joke.
"Oh," said his wife, gayly, "now you can write your Romance!" For he had told her several times that he had a romance "growling" in him.
"Write my Romance!" he exclaimed. "But what are we to do for bread and rice, next week?"
"I will take care of that," she answered. "And I will tell Ann to put a fire in your study, now."[1]
Hawthorne's introductory account of the origin of the romance in papers and relics discovered in the Custom-House is a part of the fiction. The original germ of it had probably begun to strike root in his imagination years before when he had come upon an historical record of a punishment like Hester's. In "Endicott and the Red Cross" (included in the second installment of Twice Told Tales), he had introduced for a moment among a group of culprits suffering various ingenious penalties, "a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that initial signified. Sporting
- ↑ "A Biographical Sketch of Nathaniel Hawthorne," in Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers by N. H. Houghton Mifflin, n. d., p. 496.
