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It might well have seemed imprudent for Hawthorne, whose worldly success had been slight, to marry an invalid wife. Fortune, however, was not wholly unkind, and George Bancroft, whose attention had been called to Hawthorne's needs, gave him an appointment at the Boston Custom House as weigher and gauger, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars.
Even at that, he found the profession of letters so unprofitable that he was glad to accept a position as weigher and gauger at the Boston custom-house, but he lost the place two years later by a change in administration; tried, for a while, living with the Transcendentalists at Brook Farm, and finally, taking a leap into the unknown, married and settled down in the old manse at Concord.
They had been born and brought up at Redlintie, and on the death of their parents they had remained there, the gauger having left them all his money, which was just sufficient to enable them to live like ladies, if they took tiny Magenta Cottage, and preferred an inexperienced maid.
Fifty pounds a year for life and a pension for widows and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet. And to Blacklock he wrote in verse: 'But what d'ye think, my trusty fier, I'm turned a gauger Peace be here! Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear, Ye'll now disdain me! And then my fifty pounds a year Will little gain me.
And all the time Donald kept on him a watchful eye, and had him covered, giving him no opportunity to turn the tables. For here the Highlander saw his chance. He had no wish to murder the gauger, but, at any price, he was not going to be taken.
"Tim Kennedy, your reverence," said Tim, stroking his hair down with one hand, and looking proud and modest at the same moment. "Tim, ye're a credit to us any day, and I always said so. It's a gauger he'd like to be, my lord," said he, turning to me, in a kind of stage whisper. I nodded and muttered something, when he thanked me most profoundly as if his suit had prospered.
Dirk Hatteraick vowed, in Dutch, German, and English, a deep and full revenge, both against the gauger and his abettors; and all who knew him thought it likely he would keep his word. A few days after the departure of the gipsy tribe, Mr. Bertram asked his lady one morning at breakfast whether this was not little Harry's birthday.
Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney, where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the story.
In rich and populous districts, as around London and Edinburgh and Dublin, the common practice was to bribe government officials. A historian of that time declares that "Not infrequently the gauger could have laid his hands upon a dozen stills within as many hours; but he had cogent reasons for avoiding discoveries unless absolutely forced to make them.
That he did not go was certainly better for Scottish verse, to which he contributed later so many immortal lines; and it was probably better for himself, even if he died a gauger. It is simply impossible to imagine Edison working out the phonograph, telephone, and incandescent lamp under the tropical climes he sought.
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