Collected Prose

would a bad scent, but is perfectly at ease once they are removed from her sphere. I suppose she would not for the world have killed Bunny, although she would have exposed him to the certainty of lingering starvation, without scruple or remorse.”
    Apart from these rare instances of pique and outrage, the atmosphere of Twenty Days is serene, measured, bucolic. Every morning, Hawthorne and Julian went to fetch milk at a neighboring farm; they engaged in “sham battles,” collected the mail at the Lenox post office in the afternoon, and made frequent trips to the lake. On the way, they would “wage war with the thistles,” which was Julian’s favorite sport—pretending that the thistles were dragons and beating them heartily with sticks. They collected flowers, gathered currants, and picked green beans and summer squashes from the garden. Hawthorne built a makeshift boat for Julian, using a newspaper as a sail; a drowning cat was saved from a cistern; and during their visits to the lake, they variously fished, flung stones into the water, and dug in the sand. Hawthorne gave Julian a bath every morning and then wrestled with the task of trying to curl his hair, seldom with satisfactory results. There was a bed-wetting accident on August third, a painful wasp-sting on the fifth, a stomach ache and a headache to be attended to on the thirteenth and fourteenth, and an untimely loss of bladder control during a walk home on the sixth, which prompted Hawthorne to remark “I heard him squealing, while I was some distance behind; and approaching nearer I saw that he walked wide between the legs. Poor little man! His drawers were all a-sop.” Even if he wasn’t completely at home with the job, the father had little by little become the mother, and by August twelfth we understand how thoroughly Hawthorne had assumed this role when, for the first time in more than two weeks, he suddenly lost track of where Julian was. “After dinner, I sat down with a book … and he was absent in parts unknown, for the space of an hour. At last I began to think it time to look him up; for, now that I am alone with him, I have all his mother’s anxieties, added to my own. So I went to the barn, and to the currant-bushes, and shouted around the house, without response, and finally sat down on the hay, not knowing which way to seek him. But by and by, he ran round the house, holding up his little fist, with a smiling phiz, and crying out that he had something very good for me.”
    Barring the excursion to the Shaker Village with Melville on August eighth, the pair stayed close to home, but that outing proved to be an exhilarating experience for the little boy, and Hawthorne is at his best in capturing his enthusiasm, in being able to see the event through his son’s eyes. The group lost its way on the carriage-ride home, and by the time they passed through Lenox, “it was beyond twilight; indeed, but for the full moon, it would have been quite dark. The little man behaved himself still like an old traveller; but sometimes he looked round at me from the front seat (where he sat between Herman Melville and Evert Duyckinck) and smiled at me with a peculiar expression, and put back his hand to touch me. It was a method of establishing a sympathy in what doubtless appeared to him the wildest and unprecedentedest series of adventures that had ever befallen mortal travellers.”
    The next morning, Julian announced to Hawthorne that he loved Mr. Melville as much as his father, his mother, and Una, and based on the evidence of a short letter that Melville sent to Julian six months later (long after the Hawthornes had left the Berkshires), it would appear that this fondness was reciprocated. “I am very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you,” he wrote, and then, after commenting on the heavy snow-drifts in the woods around Pittsfield, concluded with a warm valediction: “Remember me kindly to your good father, Master Julian, and Good Bye, and may Heaven always bless you, & may you be a good boy and become a great good man.”
    An earlier visit from Melville to Lenox on August first (his thirty-second birthday) provided Hawthorne with what were probably his most pleasurable hours during those three weeks of bachelor life. After stopping in at the post office with Julian that afternoon, he paused on the way home in a secluded spot to read his newspapers when “a cavalier on horseback came along the road, and