An old apothecary in a New England town, a great-granddaughter, and a cordial in a cupboard that may be the elixir of life — Hawthorne's last work, broken off at his death. He was haunted by his own ancestry: a forebear had been a judge at the Salem witch trials. He could not finish anything in his last years and knew it; the fragment was published as it stood, and it is oddly tender. Fifty-five plates of gardens, workers, and quiet American scenes, among them pictures by Eastman Johnson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, mirror the fragment's tender, unfinished world.
