The Custom House, and Main Street #227815

Later in life, Hawthorne used something of the same manner when introducing his bundle of sketches of England in the volume Our Old Home. His paper on A Consular Experience likewise is a frank talk behind the door with his reader, but is in effect a series of humorous studies of character in which this silent man indulged. Between these two personal, lightly autobiographical disclosures was a third, which perhaps has been even more read, for it stands at the entrance of his most famous book, The Scarlet Letter.