CHAP. I.
Note 1. The MS. gives the following alternative openings: “Early in the present century”; “Soon after the Revolution”; “Many years ago.”
Note 2. Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is called “Ormskirk,” and in an earlier draft of this portion of the romance, “Etheredge.”
Note 3. Author’s note.—“Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and negro.”
Note 4. Author’s note.—“It is understood from the first that the children are not brother and sister.—Describe the children with really childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.—The Doctor should occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction.”
Note 5. In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same, I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the earlier draft: “The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody’s business centres there at one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth about the country churches,—the little Norman, square, battlemented stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of strength and courage for him;—all these, mingled with succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with the sexton’s spade; until every blade of grass was human more than vegetable,—for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor’s art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled, surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark, high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being haunted.”
Note 6. Author’s note.—“The spiders are affected by the weather and serve as barometers.—It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous.”
Note 7. Author’s note.—“The townspeople are at war with the Doctor.—Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.—The result of Crusty Hannah’s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some strange way.—Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized in the street scenes.”