Nathaniel Hawthorne visits Herman Melville:
March weather prevented walks abroad, so the pair spent most of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics in the barn,—Hawthorne usually lounging upon a carpenter’s bench. When he was leaving, he jocosely declared he would write a report of their psychological discussion for publication in a book to be called ‘A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn,’ the title being a travesty upon that of Thoreau’s then recent book, ‘A Week on the Concord River.’”
(Literary shrines; the haunts of some famous American authors (1895), 191)
