Hawthorne dined one day with I and brought with him a friend from Salem. After dinner the friend said; "I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story based upon a legend of Acadie, and still current there; the legend of a girl, who in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him and only finding (found) him dying in a hospital when both were old." I wondered that this legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and said to him; "If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem?" To this Hawthorne assented and moreover promised not to treat the subject in prose till I had seen what I could do with it in verse.