In the "American Note-Book," there is a charming description of the pleasure the romancer and his young wife experienced in renovating and refurnishing the old parsonage which, at the time of their going into it, was "given up to ghosts and cobwebs." Some of these ghosts have been shiveringly described by Hawthorne himself in the marvellous paragraph of the introduction already referred to: "Our [clerical] ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlour, and sometimes rustle paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper entry--where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.
"Once while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible.
"A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour--although no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude--some ill-starched ministerial band--disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without wages."
The little drawing-room once remodelled, however, and the kitchen given over to the Hawthorne pots and pans--in which the great Hawthorne himself used often to have a stake, according to the testimony of his wife, who once wrote in this connection, "Imagine those magnificent eyes fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking in an iron kettle!"--the ghosts came no more. Of the great people who in the flesh passed pleasant hours in the little parlour, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller are names known by everybody as intimately connected with the Concord circle.
Hawthorne himself cared little for society. Often he would go to the village and back without speaking to a single soul, he tells us, and once when his wife was absent he resolved to pass the whole term of her visit to relatives without saying a word to any human being. With Thoreau, however, he got on very well. This odd genius was as shy and ungregarious as was the dark-eyed "teller of tales," but the two appear to have been socially disposed toward each other, and there are delightful bits in the preface to the "Mosses" in regard to the hours they spent together boating on the large, quiet Concord River. Thoreau was a great voyager in a canoe which he had constructed himself (and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the use of his paddle as the redman who had once haunted the same silent stream.