Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/121

Rh ton, where she sometimes took a room for the winter. Hawthorne, in his “American Note-Books,” records, under the date, November, 1840: —

“I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft’s yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was very thankful.”

It must be remembered that Hawthorne was always grateful for any dispensation which saved him from a formal dinner-party. That he enjoyed a conversation with Margaret Fuller personally is plain from an entry in his “American Note-Books,” describing an interview between them during one of her visits to Concord: —

&emsp; “After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson’s I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading; for she had a book in her hand, with some strange title, which I did not understand, and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering its sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us and smiled to see Margaret, reclining on the ground, and me sitting by her side. He made some remark about the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood.