nal in plot, but retold in such a way as to give them a permanent place in our literature. Some of them are stories of New England history. Others are Indian legends, or legends of colonial times. Still others, more original in plot, are little descriptive sketches of life as Hawthorne saw it. A vein of mystery runs through many of them; often beneath the story there is a second story, or allegory, such as we find in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Thus Hawthorne says, "I myself have followed the quest of the Great Carbuncle"; and he speaks of himself as sitting by the wayside of life, like "a man under enchantment." This sentence gives an excellent clue to Hawthorne's method. He sat by the wayside, looking at the men and women and children who passed by, but he looked upon them not as individuals, about whom he might write as O. Henry wrote about the busy broker, but as types of the human race, people who were struggling for happiness or fame or for some high ideal.

3. It is in this way that "The Ambitious Guest" is to be read. It is based on an event that actually happened. In 1821 a family named Willey, living in Crawford's Notch in Carroll County, N. H., was destroyed in a great slide, or avalanche. The story was told in a crude sketch by a man who was building a barn about six miles from the scene, who rescued his own family just before his house and the partially completed barn were swept away. Later this man, with others, found the ruins of the Willey house and brought out the bodies of the people who had been buried in the slide. Among them was "a young man about twenty years old, named David Nickerson, whom the Willeys had brought up."

Thus Hawthorne's story is a "twice-told tale." It is based on fact, yet the author's purpose is not to retell the story in better literary form than in the crude sketch written by a man who had escaped. The figures are purely imaginary, not portraits of the members of the Willey family. They are not even given names. The grandmother, the farmer, the young girl, the stranger, the children-all are portraits drawn in vague and general terms, not minutely. The central figure, of course, is the young stranger. His life had been solitary, cut off from his kind, like Hawthorne's own life in those twelve long years at Salem. The secret of his character, the author tells us, was "high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne

to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave." This is the clue to Hawthorne's purpose in writing the story. It is a tragedy of unrealized ambition. The gifted youth who had set his heart on winning fame was cut off, his very name unknown.

4. This theme links the story with the poem by Lowell which you have just read and with the poem by Burns that follows. Sir Launfal also sought personal distinction, and set out over land and sea to find it. The vision of service that came to him changed his plans; the Grail was found at home. Hawthorne makes no comment on the ambition of the young stranger in the mountain farmhouse; but the quest of the youth for fame was as vain as Sir Launfal's idea that the Grail was to be found through marvelous adventures in distant lands. In "The Cotter's Saturday Night," the portrait of the peasant family may be compared with Hawthorne's description of the inmates of this mountain house.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

1. Find in the story the details that enable you to picture to yourself the mountain home. How does Hawthorne suggest that the family had contact with the outside world? Were they really a part of the life of this world?, Was their life a lonely one?

2. What was the great ambition that the young stranger had? How did it affect him? Had he accomplished anything? Did he care for money or for fame in his lifetime? Why does the author call it "a high and abstracted ambition"?

3. What effect had the story of his ideals upon the farmer? Upon the children? Upon the grandmother? Upon the young girl? 4. Find the sentences and phrases that prepare us for the tragedy, such as "the heavy footstep," "the sure place of refuge," etc. What is the significance of the child's desire to go that night to the Flume? Of the passing of the wagon? Of the frequent mention of the wind?

5. What is the climax of the story? What adds to the horror of it?

6. The great slide caused the death of all; is there anything else in the story to sadden those who read it? What greater tragedy leads Hawthorne to conclude his story with the question, "Whose was the agony of that death moment?"

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

EXPLANATORY NOTES

1. This poem was written in 1785. Burns was then twenty-six years old, and was living on a farm at Mossgiel, Scotland. He had written a few poems, mainly love lyrics, Nature poems, songs, and satires, and these had been circulated in manuscript among his friends, so that he had some reputation as a poet. The Mossgiel farm he had taken with his two brothers after the death of his father in 1784, and the poem reflects not only the love he had for his father (whose character is well portrayed in the Cotter) but also his own training as a farmer. At thirteen he had threshed corn; at fifteen he was the chief laborer on his father's farm; and in later years he remarked, "I was bred to the plow and am independent."

2. You will find a brief biography of Burns in the "Biographical Index of Authors," beginning on page 571; a few additional points may be added here to help you to see the poem in relation to the life of its author. The first of these has to do with his reading. He had little schooling. An old woman named Betty Davison told him legends of Scottish history and superstition, and aroused in him a love for old ballads and songs that led him, in after years, to tramp about the country making collections, very much as Walter Scott did at a later time. His first book, outside of school texts, was a life of Hannibal. His father also owned or borrowed a life of Wallace (Burns later wrote a stirring song about the "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled"); a philosophical essay by John Locke; and a "geographical grammar." A little later some collections of eighteenth century letters came into Robert's hands, and he gained from these and from the Spectator, a collection of essays by Addison, a desire to learn to write. lections of Scottish songs and ballads by Ramsay He read Pope's translation of Homer, and coland Fergusson. Burns, therefore, was not a man of great learning. A few books influenced him profoundly; the rest of his inspiration came from Nature and the simple life of the Scottish peasant.

3. While Burns lived for a time in Edinburgh and was later connected with the customs, the greater part of his life was passed on the farms at Mossgiel and Ellisland. In 1786 he planned to go to Jamaica, and his first volume of poems was published to raise the money for the trip. The success of his volume encouraged him to write more poetry, most of which belonged to the kinds of lyrics with which he had begun. He wrote about small animals or the animals of the farm, and about homely flowers, all very simply, finding subjects for poetry in