 Introduction and Preface to the House of the Seven Gables. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne had completed the Scarlet Letter, he began the House of the Seven Gables. Meanwhile, he had removed from Salem to Lenox in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he occupied with his family a small red wooden house, still standing at the date of this edition, near the Stockbridge Bowl. I shall have the new story ready by November, he explained to his publisher on the 1st of October, for I am never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me, multiplying and brightening its hues. But by vigorous application he was able to complete the new work about the middle of the January following. Since research has disclosed the manner in which the Romances interwoven with incidents from the history of the Hawthorne family, the House of the Seven Gables has acquired an interest apart from that by which it first appealed to the public. John Hawthorne, spelled H-A-T-H-O-R-N-E, as the name was then spelled, the great grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a magistrate at Salem in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and officiated at the famous trials for witchcraft held there. It is of record that he used peculiar severity towards a certain woman who was among the accused, and the husband of this woman prophesied that God would take revenge upon his wife's persecutors. This circumstance doubtless furnished a hint for that piece of tradition in the book, which represents a pinch on of a former generation as having persecuted one maul who declared that God would give his enemy, quote, blood to drink, end quote. It became a conviction with the Hawthorne family that a curse had been pronounced upon its members, which continued in force in the time of the Romancer. A conviction perhaps derived from the recorded prophecy of the injured woman's husband, just mentioned, and here again we have a correspondence with Maul's malediction in the story. Furthermore, there occurs in the American notebooks, August 27, 1837, a reminiscence of the author's family to the following effect. Philip English, a character well known in early Salem annals, was among those who suffered from John Hawthorne's magisterial harshness, and he maintained in consequence a lasting feud with the old Puritan official. What had his death English left daughters, one of whom was said to have married the son of Justice John Hawthorne, whom English had declared he would never forgive. It is scarcely necessary to point out how clearly this foreshadows the final union of those hereditary foes, the pinchons and mauls, through the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave. The romance, however, describes the mauls as possessing some of the traits known to have been characteristic of the Hawthorne's. For example, Quote, so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other men, not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken of, by an hereditary characteristic of reserve. End Quote. Thus, while the general suggestion of the Hawthorne line and its fortunes was followed in the romance, the pinchons taking the place of the author's family, certain distinguishing marks of the Hawthorne's were assigned to the imaginary maul posterity. There are one or two other points which indicate Hawthorne's method of basing his compositions. The result, in the main of pure invention, on the solid ground of particular facts, allusion is made, in the first chapter of the Seven Gables, to a grant of lands in Waldo County, Maine, owned by the pinchon family. In the American notebooks there is an entry, dated August 12, 1837, which speaks of the revolutionary general, Knox, and his land grant in Waldo County, by virtue of which the owner had hoped to establish an estate on the English plan, with a tenetry to make it profitable for him. An incident of much greater importance in the story is the supposed murder of one of the pinchons by his nephew, to whom we are introduced as Clifford Pinchon. In all probability Hawthorne connected with this, in his mind, the murder of Mr. White, a wealthy gentleman of Salem, killed by a man whom his nephew had hired. This took place a few years after Hawthorne's graduation from college, and was one of the celebrated cases of the day, Daniel Webster taking part prominently in the trial. But it should be observed here that such resemblances as these between sundry elements in the work of Hawthorne's fancy and details of reality are only fragmentary and are rearranged to suit the author's purposes. In the same way he has made his description of Hepsiba Pinchon's seven-gabled mansion conform so nearly to several old dwellings, formally or still extant in Salem, that strenuous efforts have been made to fix upon some one of them as the veritable edifice of the romance. A paragraph in the opening chapter has perhaps assisted this delusion that there must have been a single original house of the seven gables, framed by flesh-and-blood carpenters, for it runs thus. Quote, Familiar as it stands in the writer's recollection, for it has been an object of curiosity with him from boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of a long past epoch, and as the scene of events more full of interest perhaps than those of a gray feudal castle, familiar as it stands in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine. End quote. Hundreds of pilgrims annually visit a house in Salem, belonging to one branch of the Ingersoll family of that place, which is stoutly maintained to have been the model for Hawthorne's visionary dwelling. Others have supposed that the now vanished house of the identical Philip English, whose blood, as we have already noticed, became mingled with that of the Hawthorne's, supplied the pattern, and still a third building, known as the Kerwin Mansion, has been declared the only genuine establishment. Notwithstanding persistent popular belief, the authenticity of all these must positively be denied, although it is possible that isolated reminiscences of all three may have blended with the ideal image in the mind of Hawthorne. He, it will be seen, remarks in the preface, alluding to himself in the third person, that he trusts not to be condemned for laying out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. More than this, he stated to persons still living that the house of the Romance was not copied from any actual edifice, but was simply a general reproduction of a style of architecture belonging to colonial days, examples of which survived into the period of his youth, but have since been radically modified or destroyed. Here, as elsewhere, he exercised the liberty of a creative mind to heighten the probability of his pictures without confining himself to a literal description of something he had seen. While Hawthorne remained at Lenox, and during the composition of this Romance, various other literary personages settled or stayed for a time in the vicinity, among them Herman Melville, whose intercourse Hawthorne greatly enjoyed. Henry James, Sr., Dr. Holmes, J. T. Hedley, James Russell Lowell, Edwin P. Whipple, Frederica Bremer, and J. T. Fields, so that there was no lack of intellectual society in the midst of the beautiful and inspiring mountain scenery of the place. In the afternoons, nowadays, he records, shortly before beginning the work, this valley in which I dwell seems like a vast basin filled with golden sunshine as with wine. And happy in the companionship of his wife and their three children, he led a simple, refined, idyllic life, despite the restrictions of a scanty and uncertain income. A letter written by Mrs. Hawthorne at this time, to a member of her family, gives incidentally a glimpse of the scene which may properly find a place here. She says, I delight to think that you also can look forth, as I do now, upon a broad valley and a fine amphitheater of hills, and are about to watch the stately ceremony of the sunset from your piazza. But you have not this lovely lake, nor I suppose the delicate purple mist which folds these slumbering mountains and airy veils. Mr. Hawthorne has been lying down in the sunshine, slightly flickered with the shadows of a tree, and Una and Julian have been making him look like the mighty pan by covering his chin embraced with long grass-blades that looked like a verdant and venerable beard. The pleasantness and peace of his surroundings and of his modest home in Lenox may be taken into account as harmonizing with the mellow serenity of the romance them produced. Of the work, when it appeared in the early spring of 1851, he wrote to Horatio Bridge, these words, now published for the first time. Quote, The house of the seven gables, in my opinion, is better than the scarlet letter. But I should not wonder if I had refined upon the principal character a little too much for popular appreciation, nor if the romance of the book should be somewhat at odds with the humble and familiar scenery in which I invested. But I feel that portions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write, and the publisher speaks encouragingly of its success. From England, especially, came many warm expressions of praise, a fact which Mrs. Hawthorne, in a private letter, commented on as the fulfillment of a possibility which Hawthorne, writing in boyhood to his mother, had looked forward to. He had asked her if she would not like him to become an author, and have his books read in England. This is the end of the introductory note, and it's signed G.P.L. Preface When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former, while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances to a great extent of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospheric medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges he has stated, and especially to mingle the marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution. In the present work the author has proposed to himself, but with what success, fortunately, it is not for him to judge, to keep undeviatingly within his immunities. The point of view in which this tale comes under the romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend prolonging itself, from an epic now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to render it the more difficult of attainment. Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral—the truth, namely, that the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and divesting itself of every temporary advantage becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief, and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind, or indeed any one man, of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, or rather as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, thus it wants depriving it of life and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, reckoning at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident at the last page than at the first. The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical connection, which, though slight, was essential to his plan, the author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. The personages of the tale, though they give themselves out to be of ancient stability and considerable prominence, are really of the author's own making, or at all events, of his own mixing. Their virtues can shed no luster, nor their defects redound in the Mermotis degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which they profess to be inhabitants. He would be glad, therefore, if, especially in the quarter to which he alludes, the book may be read strictly as a romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the county of Essex. Written in Lennox, January 27, 1851, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This is the end of the introductory note and the preface. The next file will begin the actual story. CHAPTER I THE OLD PINCHON FAMILY Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely-peaked gables facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pinchon Street. The house is the old Pinchon house, and an elm tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pinchon Elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pinchon Street for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities, the great elm tree and the weather-beaten edifice. The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodesimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pinchon house, otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme. With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the foundation of the house was laid, and at rapid glance at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind, pointing to, here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and walls, we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epic not very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection with the long past, a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions almost are wholly obsolete, which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. Parts two might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far distant time, that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The house of the seven gables, antique as it now looks, was not the first habitation erected by civilized men on precisely the same spot of ground. Pinchon Street formally bore the humbler appellation of Maul's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil, before whose cottage door it was a cow-path, a natural spring of soft and pleasant water, a rare treasure on the Seagurt Peninsula where the Puritan settlement was made, had early induced Matthew Maul to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote from what was then the center of the village. In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the strength of a grant from the legislature. Colonel Pinchon, the claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was characterized by an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maul, on the other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defense of what he considered his right, and for several years he succeeded in protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had hewn out of the primal forest to be his garden ground and homestead. No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition. It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive opinion as to its merits, although it appears to have been at least a matter of doubt whether Colonel Pinchon's claim was not unduly stretched in order to make it cover the small meets and bounds of Matthew Maul. What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact that this controversy between two ill-matched antagonists, at a period more over, lauded as we may when personal influence had far more weight than now, remained for years undecided and came to a close only with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil. The mode of his death, too, affects the mind differently in our day from what it did a century and a half ago. It was a death that blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive the plow over the little area of his habitation and obliterate his place and memory from among men. Old Matthew Maul, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft. He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes and those that take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen, the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived. If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former judicial massacres, but people of all ranks, their own equals, brethren and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maul, should have trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow sufferers. But in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epic had subsided, it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pinchon had joined in the general cry to purge the land from witchcraft, nor did it fail to be whispered that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maul. It was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutor's conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for his spoil. At the moment of execution, with the halter about his neck and while Colonel Pinchon sat on horseback grimly gazing at the scene, Maul had addressed him from the scaffold and uttered a prophecy of which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very words. "'God,' said the dying man, pointing his finger with a ghastly look at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, God will give him blood to drink.' After the reputed wizard's death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pinchon's grasp. When it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansion spacious, ponderously framed of oak and timber, and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maul, there was much shaking of the head among the village gossips. But absolutely expressing a doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity throughout the proceedings which had been sketched, they nevertheless hinted that he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the Pinchon blood were to be borne. The terror and ugliness of Maul's crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and melancholy house. Why then, while so much of the soil around him was bestroomed with the virgin forest leaves, why should Colonel Pinchon prefer a site that had already been accursed? But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious. Had he been told of a bad heir, it might have moved him somewhat, but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Count with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which a finder's sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his cellar and laid the deep foundations of his mansion on the square of earth whence Matthew Mall, forty years before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and as some people thought, an ominous fact, that very soon after the workmen began their operations, the spring of water above mentioned entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain that the water of Mall's well, as it continued to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now, and any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of intestinal mischief to those who quenched their thirst there. The reader may deem it singular, that the head carpenter of the new edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe the property of the soil had been rested. Not improbably he was the best workman of his time, or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Timber was it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest penny, or rather a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse of his father's deadly enemy. At all events Thomas Mall became the architect of the house of the seven gables, and performed his duty so faithfully that the Timber framework fastened by his hands still holds together. Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer's recollection, for it has been an object of curiosity with him from boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and statelyest architecture of a long past epic, and as the scene of events more full of human interest, perhaps, than those of a grey feudal castle. Familiar as it stands in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine. The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would feign give of its appearance on the morning when the puritan magnate bade all the town to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well as religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the reverend Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and as some authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least by the weight and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The chimney of the new house, and short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs and onions in abundance. The mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appetite. Mall's lane, or Pinchon Street, as it were now more decorous to call it, was thronged at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to church. All as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in pride not monesty. Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The many lattices, with their small diamond-shaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third, through a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and broken halves of bricks, these, together with a lately turned earth, on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to make among men's daily interests. The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door, was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, and whatever of aristocracy there was in town or county, thither, too, thronged the plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number. Just within the entrance, however, stood two serving men, pointing some of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen, and ushering others into the state-leer rooms, hospitable alike to all, but still with a scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet garments somber but rich, stiffly plated ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves, venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy to distinguish the gentleman of worship at that period from the tradesmen with his plodding air, or the laborer in his leather jerken, stealing awestrucken into the house which he had perhaps helped to build. One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious visitors. The founder of this state-lea mansion, a gentleman noted for the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn festival. He was as yet invisible. The most favored of the guests had not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel Pinchon's part became still more unaccountable when the second dignitary of the province made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception. The lieutenant-governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated glories of the day, had alighted from his horse and assisted his lady from her sidesaddle, and crossed the Colonel's threshold without other greeting than that of the principal domestic. This person, a gray-headed man of quiet and most respectful deportment, found it necessary to explain that his master still remained in his study or private apartment on entering which an hour before he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed. "'Do you not see, fellow?' said the high sheriff of the county, taking the servant aside. "'That does is no less a man than the lieutenant-governor. Some and Colonel Pinchon it wants. I know that he has received letters from England this morning, and in the perusal in consideration of them an hour may have passed away without his noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be said to represent King William in the absence of the governor himself. Call your master instantly.' "'Nay, please, your worship,' answered the man in much perplexity, but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe character of Colonel Pinchon's domestic rule, my master's orders were exceeding strict, and as your worship knows he permits of no discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list open yonder door, I dare not, though the governor's own voice should bid me do it.' "'Poo-poo, master high sheriff,' cried the lieutenant-governor, who had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in station to play a little with his dignity. "'I will take the matter into my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to greet his friends. Else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a sip too much of his canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which casket were best to broach in honour of the day. But since he is so much behind hand, I will give him a remenberance, sir, myself.' "'Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new panels re-echo with a loud, free knock. Then looking round with a smile to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came, however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as at first. And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be that as it might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pinchon. When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep, dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits. "'Strange for sooth, very strange,' cried the lieutenant-governor, whose smile was changed to a frown. But seeing that our host sets us the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it aside and make free to intrude on his privacy.' He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new house. It rustled the silk and garments of the ladies, and waved the long curls of the gentleman's wigs, and shook the window hangings and the curtains of the bedchambers, causing everywhere a singular stir, which yet was more like a hush. A shadow of awe and half-fearful anticipation, nobody knew wherefor, nor of what, had all at once fallen over the company. They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the lieutenant-governor in the eagerness of their curiosity into the room in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld nothing extraordinary, a handsomely furnished room of moderate size, somewhat darkened by curtains, books arranged on shelves, a large map on the wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pinchon, beneath which sat the original Colonel himself in an oaken elbow-chair with a pen in his hand. Letters, parchment, and blank sheets of paper were on the table before him. He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front of which stood the lieutenant-governor, and there was a frown on his dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness that had impelled them into his private retirement. A little boy, the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that ever dared to be familiar with him, now made his way among the guests, and ran towards the seated figure. Then, pausing half-way, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixidness of Colonel Pinchon's stare, that there was blood on his rough, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man was dead, dead in his new house. There is a tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious awe, to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old Matthew Maul, the executed wizard. God hath given him blood to drink! Thus early had that one guest, the only guest who was certain, at one time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling. Thus early had death stepped across the threshold of the house of the seven gables. Colonel Pinchon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise in its day. There were many rumours, some of which have vaguely drifted down to the present time, how that appearance is indicated violence, that there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a bloody hand on his plated ruff, and that his peaked beard was disheveled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pooled. It was averred likewise that the lattice window near the Colonel's chair was open, and that only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence the figure of a man had been seen clamouring over the garden fence in the rear of the house. But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since moldered into the earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to that other fable of the skeleton hand which the Lieutenant Governor was said to have seen at the Colonel's throat, but which vanished away as he advanced further into the room. Certain it is, however, that there was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body. One, John Swinerton by name, who appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself, adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a bewildered ment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner's jury sat upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable verdict of, sudden death. It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and eminent character of the deceased must have ensured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance. As none such is on record, it is safe to assume that none existed. Tradition, which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the well babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers, tradition is responsible for all contrary averments. In Colonel Pinchon's funeral sermon, which was printed, and is still extant, the Reverend Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career, the happy seasonableness of his death. His duties all performed, the highest prosperity attained, his race and future generations fixed on a stable basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to come. What other upward step remained for this good man to take, save the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven? The pious clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world with a clutch of violence upon his throat. The family of Colonel Pinchon, at the epic of his death, seemed destined to as fortunate a permanence as can any wise consist with the inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be anticipated that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their prosperity than wear away and destroy it. For not only had his son and heir come into an immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the general court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of eastern lands. These possessions, for as such they might almost certainly be reckoned, as the greater part of what is now known as Waldo County in the State of Maine, and were more extensive than many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince's territory, on European soil. When the pathless forest that still covered this wild principality should give place, as it inevitably must, though perhaps not till ages hence, to the golden fertility of human culture, it would be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pinchon blood. Had the Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available. But in spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pinchon, evident and sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the perspective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon. His son lacked not merely the father's eminent position, but the talent and force of character to achieve it. He could therefore effect nothing by dint of political interest, and the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent after the Colonel's decease as it had been pronounced in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence and could not anywhere be found. Efforts it is true were made by the Pinchons, not only then but at various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But in course of time the territory was partly re-granted to more favored individuals, and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if they ever heard of the Pinchon title, would have laughed at the idea of any man's asserting a right on the strength of moldy parchments signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and forgotten, to the lands which they or their fathers had rested from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance which all along characterized the Pinchons. It caused the poorest member of the race to feel as if he had inherited a kind of nobility, and might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it. In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal grace over the hard material of human life without stealing away any truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort while awaiting the realization of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the public memory, the Pinchons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had put down woods, lakes, and rivers, they marked out the clearest spaces, and dotted the villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately forming a princeton for themselves. In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense and practical energy that had so remarkably distinguished the original founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted with the sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At two or three epics, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, Here is the old Pinchon come again. Now the seven gables will be new-shingled. From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various reasons, however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the successive proprietors of this estate, were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no question, but old Matthew Mall, it is to be feared, trod downward from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the way, on the conscience of a Pinchon. If so, we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property, conscious of wrong and failing to rectify it, did not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of expression to say of the Pinchon family that they inherited a great misfortune than the reverse? We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the history of the Pinchon family, in its unbroken connection with the house of the Seven Gables, nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim-looking glass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there. The old Colonel himself, and his many descendants, summoned the garb of antique babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Mall had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed pinchons, not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan pinchon, and the wizard Mall, the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold was remembered, with the very important addition that it had become a part of the pinchon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper between jest and earnest, he has Mall's blood to drink. The sudden death of a pinchon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar to what had been related to the Colonel's exit, was held as giving additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance that Colonel Pinchon's picture, in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his will, remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those stern, immitable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind, there will be no tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor, perhaps as a portion of his own punishment, is often doomed to become the evil genius of his family. The Pinchons, in brief, lived long, for the better part of two centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended most other New England families during the same period of time. Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took the general characteristics of the little community in which they felt. A town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of its sympathies, but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals, and now and then, stranger occurrences, then one meets with almost anywhere else. During the revolution, the Pinchon of that epoch, adopting the royal side, became a refugee. Pinchon repented, and made his reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the house of the seven gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most noted event in the Pinchon annals had been likewise the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race, no less than the violent death, for so it was adjudged, of one member of the family by the criminal act of another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased Pinchon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime, but either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or lastly, an argument of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a monarchy, the high respectability and political influence of the criminal's had availed to mitigate his doom from death to perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years before the action of our story commences. Laterally there were rumours, which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in, that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be summoned forth from his living tomb. It is essential to say a few words, respecting the victim of this now almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which constituted what remained of the ancient Pinchon property. Being of an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought himself, it is a word, to the conclusion that Matthew Maul, the wizard, had been fowly wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of the ill-gotten spoil, with the black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils, the question occurred whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late hour, to make restitution to Maul's posterity. To a man living so much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and anti-carry an old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong. It was the belief of those who knew him best that he would positively have taken the very singular step of giving up the house of the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maul, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among his pinch-on relatives. Their exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose, but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime. But there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than their relatives. They may even cherish dislike or positive hatred to the latter. But yet in view of death the strong prejudice of propinquity revives and impels the testitor to send down his estate in the line marked out by customs so immemorial that it looks like nature. In all the pinch-ons this feeling had the energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples of the old bachelor, at whose death accordingly the mansion-house, together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of his next legal representative. This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man, who had been convicted of the uncle's murder. The new heir, up to the period of his accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had it once reformed and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of society. In fact he showed more of the pinch-on quality, and had won higher eminence in the world than any of his race since the time of the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of judge. Later he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both branches of the state legislature. Judge Pinchon was unquestionably an honor to his race. He had built himself a country seat within a few miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and virtue, as the newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election, befitting the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman. There were few of the pinch-ons left to sun themselves in the glow of the judge's prosperity. In respect to natural increase the breed had not thriven. It appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of the family known to be extant were, first, the judge himself, and a single surviving son, who was now traveling in Europe. Next, the thirty years prisoner already alluded to, and a sister of the latter, who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven Gables, in which she had a life estate by the will of the old bachelor. She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her choice to remain so, in as much as her affluent cousin, the judge, had repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest pinch-on was a little country girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had already taken another husband. As for Matthew Mall's posterity it was supposed now to be extinct. For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the malls had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust a death. To all appearances they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no mallis against individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them, or if at their own fireside they transmitted from father to child any hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony it was never acted upon nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been singular had they ceased to remember that the house of the Seven Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully their own. There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist, at least so excellent a counterfeit of right that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown, and it was far more so in anti-revolutionary days when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the malls, at all events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were generally poverty-stricken, always publian and obscure, working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts, laboring on the wharves, or following the sea, as sailors before the mast, living here and there about the town in hired tenements, and coming finally to the Alm's house as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or publian. For thirty years passed, neither town record, nor gravestone, nor the directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man bore any trace of Matthew Mall's descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere, here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had ceased to keep an onward course. So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other men, not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken of, by an hereditary character of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such, grew conscious of a circle round about the Mall's, within the sanctity or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness and good fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step. It was this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy, continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches. The mantle, or rather the ragged cloak of old Matthew Mall, had fallen upon his children. They were half-believed to inherit mysterious attributes. The family eye was said to possess strange power. Among other good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assign them, that of exercising an influence over people's dreams. The pensions, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than bond-servants to these plebeian malls on entering the topsy-turvy commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous. A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven gabled mansion in its most recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close. The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks had long ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town, so that, though the old edifice was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small, built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plotting uniformity of common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness externally that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as for the old structure of our story, its white oak frame and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the all-huge clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed there. So much had been suffered, and something too enjoyed, that the very timbers were oozy as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and somber reminiscences. The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a meditative look that you could not pass it without the idea that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon. In front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pinchon Elm, which, in reference to such trees, as one usually meets with, might well be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson of the first Pinchon, and though now four-score years of age, or perhaps nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven gables and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature. The street, having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open latticework, through which could be seen a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of burdocs, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or three feet long. Then house there appeared to be a garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and outbuildings that stood on another street. It would be an omission, trifling indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and on the slopes of the roof, nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye to a crop, not of weeds, but flower shrubs, which were growing aloft in the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of the gables. They were called Alice's posies. The tradition was that a certain Alice pinch on it flung up the seeds in sport, and that the dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of soil for them, out of which they grew when Alice had long been in her grave. However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and sweet to observe how nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the pinch on family, and how the ever returning summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort. There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop door, divided horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date. This same shop door had been a subject of no slight mortification to the present occupant of the august pinch on house, as well as to some of her predecessors. The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle, but since the reader must needs be led into the secret, he will please to understand that, about a century ago, the head of the pinch on's found himself involved in serious financial difficulties. The fellow, gentleman, as he styled himself, can hardly have been other than a spurious interloper, for, instead of seeking office from the king or the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to eastern lands, he bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a shop door through the side of his ancestral residence. It was the custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods and transact business in their own dwellings. But there was something pitifully small in this old pinch on's mode of setting about his commercial operations. It was whispered that, with his own hands, all be ruffled as they were, he used to give change for his shilling and would turn a half-penny twice over to make sure that it was a good one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there. Immediately on his death the shop door had been locked, bolted, and barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never been once opened. The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the little shop remained just as he had left them. It used to be affirmed that the dead shopkeeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters any night of the year, ransacking his till, or pouring over the dingy pages of his day-book. From the look of unutterable woe upon his face it appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance. And now, in a very humble way, as will be seen, we proceed to open our narrative. It still lacked half an hour of sunrise. When Miss Hepsabuck pinched on, we will not say awoke it being doubtful whether the poor lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of mid-summer, but at all events arose from her solitary pillow and began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person, far from us be the end decorum of assisting even an imagination had a maiden lady's toilet. Our story must therefore await Miss Hepsabuck at the threshold of her chamber, only presuming, meanwhile, to note some of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, in as much as they could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself. The old maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certain respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line, who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote gable. She had a house by itself, indeed, with locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss Hepsabuck's gusty sighs. Inaudible the creaking joints of her stiffened knees as she knelt down by the bedside. An inaudible too by mortal ear, but heard with all comprehending love and pity in the farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer, now whispered, now aggrown, now a struggling silence, wherewith she besought the defined assistance through the day. Evidently this is to be a day of more than ordinary trial to Miss Hepsabuck, who, for above a quarter of a century gone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with such fervor praise the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold, sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays. The maiden-lady's devotions are concluded. Will she now issue forth over the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments. First, every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened with difficulty, and with a succession to spasmodic jerks, then almost closed again with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling of stiff silks, a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepsaba, moreover, of taking a step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her appearance on all sides, and at full length in the oval, dingy-framed toilet-glass that hangs above her table. Truly, well indeed, who would have thought it? Is all this precious time to be lavished on the metutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person who never goes abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes another way? Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause, for it is given to the soul's sentiment, or we might better say, heightened and rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion, to the strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small lock. She has opened a secret drawer of an esgritoire, and is probably looking at a certain miniature, done in Melbone's most perfect style, and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It was once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young man, in a silken dressing gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full, tender lips and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much capacity of thought as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except that he would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it. Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepsiba? No. She never had a lover. Poor thing. How could she? Nor ever knew by her own experience what love technically means. And yet her undying faith and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the original of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart to feed upon. She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before the toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more footsteps to and fro, and here at last, with another pitiful sigh, like a gust of chilled damp wind out of a long closed vault, the door of which has accidentally been set ajar. Here comes Miss Hepsiba Pinshan. Fourth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage, a tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the stairs like a nearsighted person, as in truth she is. The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward, caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the house of the seven gables, which, many such sunrises as it had witnessed, looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement of the room which Hepsiba entered after descending the stairs. It was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, paneled with dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece set round with pictured tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board through which ran the funnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable hue. In the way of furniture there were two tables, one constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede, the other most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time the ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was, however, in a very antique elbow-chair with a high back carved elaborately in oak and a roomy depth within its arms that made up by its spacious comprehensiveness for the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in a modern chair. As for ornamental articles of furniture we recollect but two, if such they may be called. One was a map of the Pinchon territory at the eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skillful old draftsmen, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and wild beasts, among which was seen a lion, the natural history of the region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old Colonel Pinchon at two-thirds length, representing the stern features of a puritanic-looking personage in a skullcap, with a laced band and a grisly beard, holding a Bible with one hand and in the other uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on entering the apartment, Ms. Hepsaba Pinchon came to a pause, regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow, which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. But it was no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage, of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be susceptible. And this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her nearsightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one. We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor Hepsaba's brow. Her scowl, as the world, or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly persisted in calling it. Her scowl had done Ms. Hepsaba a very ill office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid, nor does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim-looking glass and perpetually encountering her own frown with its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as unjustly as the world did. How miserably cross I look! She must often have whispered to herself, and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations, all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so perversely stern and even fierce. Nor had Hepsaba ever any hardy-hood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her affections. All this time, however, we are loitering faint-heartedly on the threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible reluctance to disclose what Ms. Hepsaba Pinchon was about to do. It has already been observed that, in the basement story of the gable fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade and fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop door but the inner arrangements had been suffered to remain unchanged, while the dust of ages gathered inch deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled an old pair of scales as if it were of value enough to be weighed. It treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still lingered a base-sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the hereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been the state and condition of the little shop in old Hepsaba's childhood, when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken precincts, so it had remained until within a few days past. But now, though the shop window was still closely curtained from the public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral succession of spiders their life's labor to spin and weave, had been carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid discipline in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas, had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye, privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the counter, would have discovered a barrel. Yay! Two or three barrels and a half ditto. One containing flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps, Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pinewood, full of soap and bars, also another of the same size in which were tallowed candles ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price, and such, as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of the old shopkeeper Pinchon's shabbily provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day. For instance, there was a glass pickle jar, filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock, not indeed splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons were galloping along one of the shelves in equipments and uniform of modern cut, and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epic, but less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a hundred years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of Lucifer matches, which in old times would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether-fires of Toffet. In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pinshan, and was about to renew the enterprise of that departed worthy with a different set of customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And of all places in the world, why had he chosen the house of the Seven Gables as the scene of his commercial speculations? We return to the Elderly Maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh. Indeed her breast was a very cave of Aeolus that morning, and stepped across the room on Tiptoe, as is the customary gate of Elderly Women. Passing through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated with the shop, just now so elaborately described. According to the projection of the upper story, and still more to the thick shadow of the Pinshan Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the Gable, the twilight here was still as much akin to night as morning. Another heavy sigh for Miss Hepsiba. After a moment's pause on the threshold, peering towards the window with her nearsighted scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were really quite startling. Nervously, in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say, she began to busy herself in arranging some children's playthings and other little wares on the shelves and at the shop window. In the aspect of this darker-raid, pale-faced, ladylike old figure, there was a deeply tragic character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly that so gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand. A miracle that the toy did not vanish in her grasp. A miserably absurd idea that she should go on perplexing her stiff and somber intellect with a question how to tempt little boys into her premises. At such as undoubtedly her object, now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs in its trunk it is ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There again she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepsiba, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position. As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees in quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more inclined to shed tears of sympathy from the very fact that we must need turn aside and laugh at her. For here—and if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader it is our own fault, not that of the theme—here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It was the final throw of what called itself old gentility. A lady, who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing ought for bread. This born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is feigned step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own food or starve. And we have stolen upon Miss Hepsipa Pinchon, to irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman. In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point. The tragedy is enacted with as continual repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday, and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his order. More deeply, since with us rank is the grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us behold, in poor Hepsipa, the immemorial lady, two hundred years old on this side of the water, and thrices many on the other, with her antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions, and her claim as joint heiress to that princely territory at the eastward, no longer a wilderness but a populous fertility, born, too, in Pinchon Street, under the Pinchon Elm, and in the Pinchon House, where she has spent all her days, reduced, now at that very house to be the hucksteress of a cent shop. This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of women in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse. With her nearsightedness and those tremulous fingers of hers at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress, although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little children had been often in her thoughts, and at one time she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepsiba's heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct. She watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamber window, and doubted whether she could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child could teach old Hepsiba more than old Hepsiba could teach the child. So, with many a cold, deep heartquake, at the idea of at last coming in disordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone against the cavern door of her hermitage. The poor thing bethought herself of the ancient shop window, the rusty scales, and dusty till. She might have held back a little longer, but another circumstance, not yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable singularity in her fate. For in the town of her nativity, we might point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables, and one or two it may be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter as grim an image of family pride as Miss Hepsiba Pinchon herself. It was overpoweringly ridiculous. We must honestly confess it. The deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the elm-tree with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank arm, she put a paper of pearl buttons, a jew's harp, or whatever the small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepsiba had no such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come forward and stand revealed in her proper individuality, but, like other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world's astonished gaze at once. The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshine might now be seen, stealing down the front of the opposite house, from the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the boughs of the elm tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly than here to fore. The town appeared to be waking up. A baker's cart had already rattled through the streets, chasing away the latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle jangle of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans from door to door, and the harsh peel of a fisherman's conch shell was heard far off around the corner. None of these tokens escaped Hepsiba's notice. The moment had arrived. To delay longer would be only to lengthen out her misery. Nothing remained, except to take down the bar from the shop door, leaving the entrance free. More than free, welcome, as if all were household friends, to every passer-by whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window. This last act Hepsiba now performed, letting the bar fall with what smote upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter. Then, as if the only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap, she fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral elbow-chair, and wept. Our miserable old Hepsiba. It is a heavy annoyance to a writer who endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances, in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the mean in ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example, can be wrought into a scene like this. How can we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce not a young and lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by affliction, but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head. Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a nearsighted scowl. And finally, her great life-trial seems to be that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find the same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And without all the deeper trust and a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an inimitable frown on the iron countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.