fore, there had been a terrible outbreak of superstition; men and women had been charged with witchcraft, and had been put to death for it. One of Hawthorne’s own ancestors had been a judge who had condemned innocent people to death because he believed them guilty of witchcraft.
His father died before he could know him. He was a sea-captain, and so was his father before him, who was a privateersman in the Revolutionary War. When Hawthorne was a boy of fourteen, he went with his mother to live for a year in a lonely place in Maine. He spent much of his time by himself in the open air. In summer he took his gun and roamed for hours through the woods. On winter nights he would skate by moonlight, all alone, upon the ice of Sebago Pond, and sometimes rest till morning by a great camp-fire which he built before a log-cabin. He led a strange, solitary life, and formed habits of being by himself which he never shook off; but he learned also to observe the world about him, and his eye and ear were trained like those of an Indian.
He went back to Salem at the end of the year, and, when he was ready, went to Bowdoin College, in Maine, where he was a classmate of the poet Longfellow. Another of his college friends was Franklin Pierce, who afterward was President of the United States. Hawthorne had already begun to show that he was to be a writer. “While we were lids together at a country college,” he wrote once to his friend, Horatio Bridge, an officer in the navy, “gathering blueberries in study hours, under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or