Not far away, near another shore of the shimmering "Bowl," that versatile genius "Carl Benson"--Charles Astor Bristed--dwelt for some time in a quaint old farm-house which has since been destroyed by fire, and here accomplished some of his literary work. Laurel Lake (the Scott's Pond of Hawthorne's "Note-Books"), where Beecher "bought a hundred acres to lie down upon,"--and called them Blossom Farm in the "Star Papers" written there,--was another resort of Hawthorne. We find it a pretty water, although its margins are mostly denuded of large trees. A bright matron of the vicinage, who, when a child, thought the author of the "Wonder-Book" the "greatest man in the world save only Franklin Pierce," lived then by Hawthorne's road to Laurel Lake. Her admiration for him (heightened by his intimacy with Pierce) led her to daily watch the road by which he would come from Tanglewood, and when she saw him approaching--which would be twice a week in good weather--she would go into the yard and reverently gaze at him until his swift gait had carried him out of sight. To her he was a tall, dark man with a handsome clean-shaven face and lustrous eyes which saw nothing but the ground directly before him, habitually dressed in black, with a wide-brimmed soft hat. Usually his walk was solitary, but sometimes Herman Melville, who was well known in the neighborhood, was his companion, and one autumn he was twice or thrice accompanied by "a light spare man,"--the poet Ellery Channing. Once Hawthorne strode past toward the lake when Fanny Kemble, who lived near by, rode her black steed by his side and "seemed to be doing all the talking"--she was capable of that--and "was talking politics." Having secured a Democratic auditor, she doubtless "improved the occasion" with her habitual vivaciousness. A neighbor of Hawthorne's tells us this incident of the following year, when the novelist's friend Pierce had been named for the Presidency. One dark night this neighbor went on foot to a campaign lecture at Lenox Furnace. At its close, he essayed to shorten the homeward walk by a "short cut" across the fields, and, of course, lost his way. Descrying a light, he directed his steps toward it, but found himself involved in a labyrinth of obstacles, and had to make so many détours that when he finally reached the house whence the light proceeded, and when in response to his hail the door was opened by Kemble herself, he was so distraught and amazed at being lost among his own farms that he could hardly explain his plight; but she quickly interrupted his incoherent account: "Yes, I see, poor benighted man! you've been to a Democratic meeting; no wonder you are bewildered! Now I'll lend you a good Whig lantern that will light you safe home." We find Mrs. Kemble-Butler's "Perch"--as she named her home here--a little enlarged, but not otherwise changed since the time of her occupancy. She was a general favorite, and her dark steed, which had cost her the proceeds of a volume of her poems, used to stop before every house in the vicinage. She often came, habited in a sort of bloomer costume which shocked some of her friends, to fish in the "Bowl" at the time Hawthorne dwelt by its shore.