This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912. Excerpt: ... It was of no importance to Salem then that this was Nathaniel Hawthorne. And she did not know that the reason why he was shut up in his room all day long was because he was writing stories. Yet for twelve years Hawthorne practised writing, shut up in his silent room; for he had resolved to be an author. He threw away about half that he wrote, but many of the stories appeared from time to time in magazines and papers. At last the best of them were published in one volume, which he called "Twice-Told Tales "; and then for the first time his name appeared as the author. Longfellow, who had been a classmate of his at Bowdoin College, wrote a review of the book, praising it highly. But a great many people, even in Salem, did not read it at all, though many of the stories were about Salem--mysterious stories of the days of witchcraft. Not long after, Hawthorne wrote another book of tales about the old colony days. These he called " The "Whole History of Grandfather's Chair." You have here "The Pine-Tree Shillings," so you know how Grandfather tells the tales; and if you read the rest of the book, you will see what the old chair saw from the time it was brought over from England in Governor Winthrop's boatload of Pilgrims until it held General Washington himself. If you could have seen Hawthorne in those days, you would never have suspected that he was really living in the King's Province, long ago; for what he seemed to be doing most vigorously was weighing goods and gauging casks and measuring coal down on the Boston wharves. He was weigher and gauger for the Customs House of the port. Would anyone have guessed, to see him there, that he was to make old Salem far more famous than her captains or her merchants ever had? When " politics " put another man in his ...