Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife - v. 2 Author:Julian Hawthorne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MRS. BLODGETT'S, LISBON, AND LONDON. The company at Mrs. Blodgett's, though not consisting of the most cultivated persons imaginable, was very... more » hearty and genuine; and Hawthorne was as well content with it, for every-day purposes, as with any in England. He had, indeed, an hereditary sympathy with Yankee sea-captains, and found satisfaction in the downright simplicity and sagacity of their talk. " Captain Johnson," he writes, " assigned as a reason for not boarding at this house, that the conversation made him sea-sick; and, indeed, the smell of tar and bilge-water is somewhat strongly perceptible in it. Indisputably these men are alive, and to an extent to which the Englishman never seems conscious of life. It would do John Bull good to come and sit at our table, and adjourn with us to our smoking-room; but he would be apt to go away a little crestfallen." The smoking-room was an apartment barely twenty feet square, though of a fair height; but the captains smoked a great deal, and by nine o'clock sat enveloped in a blue cloud. They played euchre with a jovial persistence that seems wonderful in the retrospect,especially as there was no gambling. The small boys in the house (there were two or three) soon succeeded in mastering the mysteries of the game, and occasionally took a hand with the captains. Hawthorne was always ready to play, and used to laugh a great deal at the turns of fortune. He rather enjoyed card- playing, and was a very good hand at whist; and knew, besides, a number of other games, many of which are now out of fashion, but which he, I suppose, had learned in his college days. Be the diversion or the conversation what it might, he was never lacking in geniality and good-fellowship; and sparkles of wit and good humor continually came brighten...« less