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The Old Manse and the Wayside, Concord, Massachusetts

TWO HOUSES MADE FAMOUS BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Nathaniel Hawthorne was thirty-eight years old before he was able to begin the ideal life of Adam with his Eve, to which he had looked forward for many years. "I want a little piece of land that I can call my own, big enough to stand upon, big enough to be buried in," he said to a friend when he was thirty-four years old. Lack of money delayed the realization, but it is a curious fact that the marriage to Sophia Peabody took place just after he had made up his mind that the thousand dollars he had invested in the Emerson Brook Farm experiment was gone forever.

The marriage took place July 9, 1842, and housekeeping was at once begun in the Old Manse at Concord, which was built in 1765 by Emerson's grandfather. But he was merely a renter; his dream of ownership was to be delayed ten years longer. The great rooms of the curious gambrel-roofed house were rather bare, and there was a scarcity of everything except love, yet the author and his bride found nothing but joy in the retired garden and the dormer-windowed house.