Mr. Thorow

I'm reading Hawthorne's Notebooks. During september 1842, Hawthorne meets a strange little man, Mr. "Thorow", from who he buys a canoe that Thorow build himself. After a few pages, I began to realize that the little man was actually Henry David Thoreau, and the wikipedia entry, quoting Hawthorne, confirmed that.

Another neighbour of Hawthorne during those years was Ralph Waldo Emerson; the notebooks contains lots of little amusing facts about him, and Hawthorne befriended him (although he had little sympathy for Emerson's unitarian beliefs).