In a gloomy house beside a New England graveyard, a gruff doctor surrounded by spiders brings up two foundlings, Ned and Elsie. Years later Ned crosses to England, drawn to an ancient estate, a legend of a bloody footstep and the riddle of his own birth. Hawthorne left the romance unfinished, and his son Julian edited it for publication in 1883.
A haunting late work that shows Hawthorne wrestling with ancestry and the pull of the Old World. Download the free EPUB.