NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
There came to the old town of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts, in the early part of the seventeenth century, an English family named Hawthorne—Puritans, like all the other inhabitants of that growing town. They proved their fidelity to Puritan principles by entering readily into all the superstitions of the day, and became noted for the zeal with which they persecuted the Quakers and hung the witches. The head of the family was a sea captain, and for many generations the men of the family followed the same avocation, "a gray-haired shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire."