""Browne's Folly" (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches")" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a letter Hawthorne wrote to his cousin. In it, he describes the Browne family, a mainstay of the Salem community whose property was left without a proprietor. After the family had fled to England, the estate was left in the care of a neighbor but was otherwise considered abandoned. As such, it became a sort of visual representation of the passage of time as it slowly fell into greater and greater disrepair.