Page:Doctor Grimshawe's Secret (1883).djvu/372

he was placed) with an energy which the softness and impressibility of his nature needed.—As for the little girl, all the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his cobwebs."—All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his characters in the mood of the "Twice-Told Tales," and then by meditation solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance."

Note 1. An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this, and concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author's "English Note-Books."

Note 2. Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in "Our Old Home," is the original of this charity.

Note 3. Author's note.—"The children find a gravestone with something like a footprint on it."

Note 4. Author's note.—"Put into the Doctor's character a continual enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody can understand the application."