Nathaniel Hawthorne once visited the children’s ward of an English workhouse, where he encountered “a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing.” The 6-year-old foundling “held up its hands, smiled in my face, and standing before me, insisted on my taking it up.” At first, Hawthorne resisted. Soon he surrendered: “It was as if God had promised the child this favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfill the contract.”
Hawthorne recorded the incident in his notebook and then published an account in his 1863 travelogue, “Our Old Home.” In 1922, his daughter Rose praised the passage as “the greatest my father ever wrote.”
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