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 weekly date from August 21 to September 18, and apparently he had made an earlier experiment, without date, in such adolescent journalism; it was printed with a pen on small note-paper, and contained such serious matter as belongs to themes at school on "Solitude" and "Industry," with the usual addresses to subscribers and the liveliness natural to family news-columns. The composition is smooth and the manner entertaining, and there is abundance of good spirits and fun of a boyish sort. The paper shows the literary spirit and taste in its very earliest bud; but no precocity of talent distinguished it, though doubtless the thought of authorship fed on its tender leaves. Such experiments belong to the life of growing boys where education is common and literary facility is thought to be a distinction and sign of promise in the young; and Hawthorne did not in these ways differ from the normal boy who was destined for college. Nothing more than these trifles is to be gleaned of his intellectual life at that time, but two or three letters pleasantly illustrate his brotherly feeling, his spirits, and his uncertainties in regard to the future, at the same time that they display his absorption in the author's craft; and they conclude the narrative of these early days before college. The first was written in October, 1820, just after the last issue of "The Spectator," to his younger sister Louisa, and shows incidentally that these literary pleasures were a family diversion:—

Dear Sister,—