CHAPTER XXXIV.

remuneration and friends forgetful of their promises. When the poor author had the money, he would buy a beefsteak for dinner; when he had not, he would make a meal of chestnuts and potatoes. He had the self-control and the probity to fulfill that essential condition of self-respect, alike for those who subsist by brain work and those who inherit fortunes—he always lived within his income; and it was only by a kind of pious fraud that a trio of his oldest friends occasionally managed to pay his rent." His friend and publisher, Mr. Ticknor, "received and invested the surplus earnings of the absentee author when American Consul at Liverpool, and had obtained from Hawthorne a promise on the eve of his departure for his post, ... that he would send him all he could spare from his official income, to be carefully nursed into a competence for his family. Never was better advice given or wiser service performed by publisher to author. The investments thus made became the means of comfort to the returned writer in the maturity of his years and his