It was owing to that circumstance that the Hawthornes came to live in Concord.
She was quite fond of me.

I used to get strawberries and wild flowers for her, and she did me great honor to draw my portrait, which now, fortunately or unfortunately, is lost.
I went up to the house while they were absent on their wedding journey when I was a boy of fourteen or fifteen to help put things in order for the reception of the young couple.
The furniture was very cheap; a good deal of it was made of common maple.

But Mrs.Hawthorne, who was an artist, had decorated it by drawings and paintings on the backs of the chairs and on the bureaus and bedsteads.

On the headboard of her bed was a beautiful copy, painted by herself, of Guido's Aurora, with its exquisite light figures and horses and youths and maidens flying through the air.
I never knew Hawthorne except as a stately figure, whom I saw sometimes in Concord streets and sometimes in his own home.

He rarely, if ever, opened his lips in my hearing.
He was always very silent, hardly spoke in the presence of any visitor with whom he was not very intimate.