Morning journal and courier., 1891-09-19
MIR. wAKEMAN,s JOURNEYINGs
At London-HawthOrne in England His Personal Identification With the Liverpool Consulate-The old Washington Building.

LONDON, England, Sept 7. To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER:
 "Thank heaven, am a sovereign again, and no longer a servant"
 So wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in this city, undertake of January 8, 1858, after having called at the American embassy to arrange for his passport to Italy.
 His unfaltering loyalty to his college and lifelong friend, Franklin Pierce, had been rewarded by appointment to the Liverpool consulate. then the most valuable, in point of fees, and most onerous and unpleasant to man of Hawthorne's fibre, in point of residence, within the gift of our govern ment. He had passed through the four years' ordeal with credit; had saved con siderable money; but had accomplished no more than batch of vagarous English notes of travel, and possibly sketched a few misty outlines of romances; and was now, after his long and irksome slavery at Liverpool, full of the elation of deliver ance and the joyful enthusiasm growing out of preparations for the long vacation in dreamful Italy-Italy the eternal inspir- CT of dreams until Italy is known.
 chanced upon these exultant words of Hawthorne, the other day, in twenty year old volume, owned by an eighty-year old man, in his hundred-year old home, beneath the shadows of four hundred yesr-old church, in the thousand-year old town of Ormskirk, Lancashire.
 While the mouldy burgh is interesting enough on its own account, the old man | in the old home by the old church became positively lovable to me, because he loved with a sort of idolatry the roma lcist whose memory we all treasure so prec ous. ly. The old church looming above the red tiles of his cottage roof is ouriousl, sur mounted by detached tower and steeple; | the pile so gray, mellow and ivy-massed as to involuntarily suggest gigantic tree Topped off in it's lower trunk, where the huge battlemented tower stops, out oi whose edge, where the steeple rises, has | sprouted second slender tree. The tra- | dition goes that two capricious maiden sis | ters desirous of raising some sacred me morial, agreed upon erecting upon Orms kirk tower and steeple, yet, disagreeine l as to uniting and connecting their work | they finally expended all their wealth and energies upon both, each independent oi | the other.
 had come to Ormskirk attracted by tho antiquity of the town and the unique character of this most venerable church and, curiously enough, while wandering | about the antique pile encountered the same man whom Hawthorne had encoun tered nearly forty years before.
 The old man had in former times beer simply a waiter in the little Ormskirk tav l ern where Hawthorne had once supped It was fair-day. he remembered, when ht came. The latter could readily under stand scarcely word of the broad Lancs l shire dialect of the ftportly and ruddy wo men" and "yeomer with small clothes ant broad -brimmed hats, and could secure no
 body's attention on account of the crowds He was about to leave Ormskirk in sor
 Of despair at the fruitless outcome of long foot journey, when the attendant