This Hawthorne's second collection includes 26 stories. All of them are filled with grand, weird, humorous, and memorable allegories. In "A Select Party" it goes about a dinner hosted by a "Man of Fancy" in "one of his castles in the air"; the guests are such incredible personages as "an incorruptible Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without world ambition, and a Beautiful Woman without pride or coquetry." The thoughts and desires of the guests are as unearthly as the clouds they inhabit. In a similar vein, "The Intelligence Office" is a comic pre-Kafkaesque allegory of a parade of customers who seek the whereabouts of their long-lost desires; only a man seeking Truth unveils the Intelligencer as "merely delusive," a bureaucrat who makes wishes come true by simply acknowledging, not fulfilling, them. In the futuristic "Earth's Holocaust," a great bonfire is lit to "consume every human and divine appendage of our mortal state": medicine, liquor, literature, weapons, money, art, jewelry, scriptures - so that there "is far less both of good and evil." Readers will be amazed by Hawthorne's mistrust of progress, his disdain for moral absolutism, and his fascination with the evasive nature of evil.