 CHAPTER VIII of the House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. THE PENTION OF TODAY Phoebe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer, if we can reckon his mighty deeds are right, of Jim Crow, the Elephant, the Camel, the Dramataries, and the Locomotive. Having expended his private fortune on the two preceding days, and the purchase of the above unheard of luxuries, the young gentleman's present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins. These articles, Phoebe accordingly supplied, and as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale. The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate, with the so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable urchin and truth was the very emblem of old father time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as time, after engulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made. After partly closing the door, the child turned back and mumbled something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she could not perfectly understand. What did you say, my little fellow? asked she. Mother wants to know, repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, how old-made Pynchon's brother does. Folks say he has got home. My cousin Hepsiba's brother, exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepsiba and her guest. Her brother? And where can he have been? That little boy only put his thumb to his broad-snubbed nose, with that look of shrewdness which a child spending much of his time in the street so soon learns to throw over his features, however unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him, without answering his mother's message, he took his departure. As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them and made his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A gold-headed cane of rare oriental wood added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would perhaps have been rather stern had not the gentleman considerably taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was perhaps unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshy effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul, whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot black, respectively, a good deal of hard labour to bring out and preserve them. As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the second story and the thick foliage of the elm tree, as well as the commodities at the window, created a sort of grey medium, his smile grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole gloom of the atmosphere, besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepsiba and her inmates, by the unassisted light of his countenance. Unperceiving a young rosebud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his brows, then smiled with more anxious benignity than ever. Ah, I see how it is, said he in a deep voice, a voice which had it come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff, but by dent of careful training was now sufficiently agreeable. I was not aware that Ms. Hepsiba-Pension had commenced business under such favourable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose. I certainly am, answered Phoebe, and added with a little air of ladylike assumption, for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently took her to be a young person serving for wages. I am a cousin of Ms. Hepsiba, on a visit to her. Her cousin, and from the country, pray pardon me then, said the gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to or smiled on before. In that case, we must be better acquainted, for unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kin's woman likewise. Let me see. Mary? Dolly? Phoebe? Yes, Phoebe is the name. Is it possible that you are Phoebe-Pension? Only child of my dear cousin and classmate Arthur. I see your father now about your mouth. Yes, yes, we must be better acquainted. I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely you must have heard of Judge Pension. As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the judge bent forward, with the pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose, considering the nearness of blood and the difference of age, of bestowing on his young relative a kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately, without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no account of itself to the intellect, Phoebe, just at the critical moment, drew back, so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much the more ridiculous as the judge prided himself on eschewing all airy matter and never mistaking a shadow for substance. The truth was, and it is Phoebe's only excuse, that although Judge Pension's glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine beholder, with the width of the street or even an ordinary sized room interposed between, yet it became quite too intense when this dark, full-fed physiognomy, so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever make it smooth, sought to bring itself into actual contact with the object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was entirely too prominent in the judge's demonstrations of that sort. Phoebe's eyes sank, and without knowing why, she felt herself blushing deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different cousins, younger as well as older than this dark brown, grizzly bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously benevolent judge. Then why not by him? Unraising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge Pension's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference of scale as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just before a thunderstorm. Not that it had the passionate intensity of the latter aspect, but was cold, hard, and mitigable, like a day-long brooding cloud. Dear me, what is to be done now, thought the country girl to herself? He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor milder than the east wind. I meant no harm. Since he is really my cousin, I would have let him kiss me if I could. Then all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pension was the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypeist had shown her in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look now on his face was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing out. Was it therefore no momentary mood, but, however skillfully concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was it hereditary in him, and transmitted down as a precious heirloom from that bearded ancestor, and whose picture both the expression and to a singular degree the features of the modern Judge were shown as by a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which led to crime are handed down from one generation to another. By a far-surer process of transmission, then human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity. But as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the Judge's countenance, then all its ugly sternness vanished. And she found herself quite overpowered by the sultry dog-day heat, as it were, of benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart into the surrounding atmosphere. Very much like a serpent, which, as a preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar odor. I like that, cousin Phoebe, cried he, with an emphatic nod of approbation. I like it much, my little cousin. You are a good child and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl, especially if she be a very pretty one, can never be too charry of her lips. Indeed, sir, said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, I did not mean to be unkind. Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial nature. The fantasy would not quit her that the original Puritan, of whom she had heard so many somber traditions, the progenitor of the whole race of New England pensions, the founder of the House of the Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it, had now stepped into the shop. And these days of offhand equipment, the matter was easily enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers. Then, patronizing already made clothing establishment, he had exchanged his velvet doublet and sable cloak with the richly worked band under his chin for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons. And lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword, took up a gold-headed cane. The Colonel pension of two centuries ago steps forward as the judge of the passing moment. Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in any other way than as a matter for a smile. Possibly also, could the two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his descendant. The judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as the Colonel's. There was undoubtedly less beef in him. They looked upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceived that the modern judge pension, if weighed in the same balance with his ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned 56 to keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the judge's face had lost the ruddy English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a shallow shade, the established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover, a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his accountants a quicker mobility than the old Englishmen's had possessed, and keener vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdy or something on which these acute endowments seem to act like dissolving acids. This process, for ought we know, may belong to the great system of human progress, which with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us by refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pension could endure a century or two more of such refinement, as well as most other men. The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the judge and his ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of mean and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel Pension's funeral discourse, the clergyman absolutely canonized his deceased parishioner, an opening, as it were, of vista through the roof of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic, nor does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the Judge Pension of today, neither clergyman nor legal critic, nor inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics, would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his political party. But besides these cold, formal, and empty words of the chisel that inscribes the voice that speaks and the pen that writes, for the public eye and for distant time, and which inevitably lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of doing so, there were traditions about the ancestor and private diurnal gossip about the Judge remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view of a public man, nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencil sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back. For example, tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of wealth. The Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was said to be as clothes-visted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindness, a rough hardiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence into that broad benignity of smile, wherewith he shone like a noonday sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the drawing rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan, if not belied by some singular stories, murmured even at this day under the narrator's breath, had fallen into certain transgressions to which men of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles, must continue liable until they put off impurity along with the gross earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with any contemporary scandal to a similar purport that may have been whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again an autocrat in his own household, had worn out three wives, and merely by the remorseless weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent them one after another, broken hearted to their graves. Here the parallel in some sort fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife, and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was a fable, however, for such we choose to consider it, though not impossibly, typical of Judge Pynchon's marital deportment, that the lady got her death blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again, because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every morning at his bedside, and token of fealty to her liege lord and master. But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances, the frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable, when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add, therefore, that the Puritan, so at least, says chimney-corner tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvelous fidelity, was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty, laying his purposes deep and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew neither rest nor conscience, trampling on the weak, and when essential to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our narrative may show. Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to Phoebe, whose country birth and residence in truth had left her pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered like cobwebs and encrustations of smoke about the rooms and chimney corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maul, the executed wizard against Colonel Pynchon and his posterity, that God would give them blood to drink, and likewise of the popular notion that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in their throats. The latter scandal, as became a person of sense and more especially a member of the Pynchon family, Phoebe had set down for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in human breath and passing from lip to ear and manifold repetition through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look like them and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it happened that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pynchon's throat, rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom. When the girl heard this queer and awkward ingurgitation, which the writer never did hear and therefore cannot describe, she very foolishly started and clasped her hands. Of course it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge that for the moment it seemed quite to mingle their identity. What is the matter with you, young woman? Said Judge Pynchon, giving her one of his harsh looks. Are you afraid of anything? Oh, nothing, sir, nothing in the world, answered Phoebe, with a little laugh of vexation at herself. But perhaps you wish to speak with my cousin Hepsiba. Shall I call her? Stay a moment, if you please, said the Judge, again beaming sunshine out of his face. You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The town air, cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good wholesome country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you? Anything remarkable in cousin Hepsiba's family? An arrival, eh? I thought so. No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin, to be an inmate with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl. You quite puzzle me, sir, replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the Judge. There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor gentle childlike man whom I believe to be cousin Hepsiba's brother. I am afraid, but you, sir, will know better than I, that he is not quite in his sound senses. But so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a mother might trust her baby with him, and I think he would play with the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startled me, oh, no, indeed. I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenious an account of my cousin Clifford, said the benevolent Judge. Many years ago, when we were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, cousin Phoebe, he appears to be weak-minded. Heaven grant him at least enough of intellect to repent of his past sins. Nobody I fancy, observed Phoebe, can have fewer to repent of. And is it possible, my dear, rejoin the Judge with the commiserating look, that you have never heard of Clifford pension, that you know nothing of his history? Well, it is all right, and your mother has shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate person, and hope the best. It is the rule which Christians should always follow and their judgments of one another, and especially is it right and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a degree of mutual dependence. But as Clifford in the parlor, I will just step in and see. Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepsaba, said Phoebe, hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. Her brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast, and I am sure she would not like him to be disturbed. Praise her, let me give her notice. But the judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced, and as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously answered to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or no ceremony in putting her aside. No, no, Miss Phoebe, said Judge Pension, and a voice as deep as a thunder growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues. Stay you here. I know the house, and know my cousin Hepsaba, and know her brother Clifford likewise. Nor need my little country cousin put herself to the trouble of announcing me. In these latter words, by the by, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into his previous benignity of manner. I am at home here, Phoebe, you must recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore, and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepsaba of my kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right at this juncture that they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them. Ha, here is Hepsaba herself. Such was the case. The vibrations of the judge's voice had reached the old gentlewoman in the parlor where she sat with face averted, waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued forth, as would appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must need say, amazingly like the dragon, which in fairy tales is want to be the guardian over an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too fierce at this moment to pass itself off on the innocent score of nearsightedness, and it was bent on Judge Pension in a way that seemed to confound if not alarm him. So inadequately had he estimated the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling gesture with her hand and stood a perfect picture of prohibition at full length in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray Hepsaba's secret and confess that the native temerousness of her character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which to her own perception set each of her joints at variance with its fellows. Possibly the judge was aware how little true heartyhood lay behind Hepsaba's formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his cousin with outstretched hand. Adopting the sensible precaution, however, to cover his advance with a smile so broad and sultry that had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure. It may have been his purpose indeed to melt poor Hepsaba on the spot, as if she were a figure of yellow wax. Hepsaba, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced, exclaimed the judge most emphatically. Now at length you have something to live for. Yes, and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred have more to live for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He belongs to us all. I know how much he requires, how much he used to require, with his delicate taste and his love of the beautiful. Anything in my house, pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the table, he may command them all. It would afford me most heartfelt gratification to see him. Shall I step in this moment? No, replied Hepsaba, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of many words. He cannot see visitors. A visitor, my dear cousin, do you call me so? cried the judge, whose sensibility it seems was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. Nay, then, let me be Clifford's host and your own likewise. Come at once to my house. The country air and all the conveniences, I may say, luxuries, that I have gathered about me will do wonders for him. And you and I, dear Hepsaba, will consult together and watch together and labor together to make our dear Clifford happy. Come, why should we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part? Come to me at once. On hearing these so hospitable offers and such generous recognition of the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up to judge pension and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with Hepsaba. The judge's smile seemed to operate on her asturbity of heart, like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever. Clifford, said she, still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt sentence, Clifford has a home here. May heaven forgive you, Hepsaba, said judge pension, reverently lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he appealed. If you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh with you in this matter, I stand here with an open heart, willing and anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my good offices, my earnest propositions for your welfare. They are such in all respects as it behooves your nearest kinsmen to make. It will be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this dismal house and stifled air when the delightful freedom of my country seat is at his command. It would never suit Clifford, said Hepsaba, as briefly as before. Woman broke forth the judge, giving way to his resentment. What is the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspect it as much. Take care, Hepsaba, take care. Clifford is on the brink of as black a ruin as ever befell him yet. But why do I talk with you, woman, as you are? Make way, I must see Clifford. Hepsaba spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really to increase in bulk, looking the more terrible also because there was so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pension's evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from the inner room, a weak, tremulous wailing voice indicating helpless alarm with no more energy for self-defense than belongs to a frightened infant. Hepsaba, Hepsaba cried the voice, go down on your knees to him, kiss his feet, and treat him not to come in. Oh, let him have mercy on me, mercy, mercy. For the instant it appeared doubtful whether it were not the judge's resolute purpose to set Hepsaba aside and step across the threshold into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for at the first sound of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a quick pace forward with something inexpressibly fierce and grim darkening forth as it were out of the whole man. To know Judge Pension was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn grapes purple or pumpkins yellow than melt the iron-branded impression out of the beholder's memory. And it rendered his aspect not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath or hatred but a certain hot felness of purpose, which annihilated everything but itself. Yet after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man? Look at the judge now. He is apparently conscious of having erred, and too energetically pressing his deeds of loving kindness on persons unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his visage, indicating that he gathers Hepsiba, Little Phoebe, and the invisible Clifford, all three together with the whole world besides, into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of affection. You do me great wrong, dear cousin Hepsiba, said he, first kindly offering his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to departure. Very great wrong, but I forgive it, and will study to make you think better of me. Of course our poor Clifford, being in so unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at present, but I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own beloved brother, nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the best offices in my power to do you. With the bow to Hepsiba, under degree of paternal benevolence in his parting nod to Phoebe, the judge left the shop, and went smiling along the street. As his customary, with the rich, when they aim at the honors of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner towards those who knew him, putting off the more of his dignity in due proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way. On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge Pension's kindly aspect that, such at least was the rumour about town, an extra passage of the water-cards was found essential, in order to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine. No sooner had he disappeared than Hepsiba grew deadly white, and staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's shoulder. Oh, Phoebe, murmured she, that man has been the horror of my life. Shall I never, never have the courage, will my voice never cease from trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is? Is he so very wicked, asked Phoebe? Yet his offers were surely kind. Do not speak of them. He has a heart of iron rejoined Hepsiba. Go now and talk to Clifford. Amuse and keep him quiet. It would disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear child, and I will try to look after the shop. Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself meanwhile, with queries as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed. And also, whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp and respectability could really, in any single instance, be otherwise than just an upright man. A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing influence and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving class in which we find our little country girl. Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be evil in the world that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view and a deeper insight may see rank, dignity, and station all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was feigned to smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pynchon's character. And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it, she concluded that Hepsibus' judgment was embittered by one of those family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison. End of Chapter 8 of The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. CHAPTER IX. Truly was there something high, generous, and noble in the native composition of our poor old Hepsibus, or else, and it was quite as probably the case, she had been enriched by poverty, developed by sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and thus endowed with heroism which never could have characterized her in what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepsibus had looked forward for the most part despairingly, never with any confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her brightest possibility to the very position in which she now found herself. In her own behalf she had asked nothing of Providence but the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother whom she had so loved, so admired for what he was or might have been, and to whom she had kept her faith alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly, at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline, the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed not merely for the bread of his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forward, our poor Gaunt Hepsibus and her rusty silks, with her rigid joints and the sad perversity of her scowl, ready to do her utmost, and with affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much. There could be few more tearful sights, and heaven forgive us if a smile insist on mingling with our conception of it, few sights with truer pathos in them, than Hepsibus presented on that first afternoon. How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without. Her little efforts to amuse him, how pitiful, yet magnanimous they were. Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a bookcase and took down several books that had been excellent reading in their day. There was a volume of pope with the rape of the lock in it, and another of the tackler and an odd one of Dryden's miscellaneous, all with tarnished gilding on their covers and thoughts of tarnished brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford, these and all such writers of society whose new works glow like the rich texture of a just woven carpet must be content to relinquish their charm for every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate of modes and manners. Hepsiba then took up Rassilis and began to read of the happy valley with the vague idea that some secret of a contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve Clifford and herself for this one day. But the happy valley had a cloud over it. Hepsiba troubled her auditor more over by innumerable sends of emphasis, which she seemed to defect without any reference to the meaning, nor in fact did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture without harvesting its profit. His sister's voice too, naturally harsh, had in the cause of her sorrowful lifetime contracted a kind of croak, which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled melancholy. And wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had been dyed black, or if we must use a more moderate simile, this miserable croak running through all the variations of the voice is like a black silken thread on which the crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on mourning for dead hopes, and they ought to die and be buried along with them. Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepsiba searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime. At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pynchon's harpsichord. It was a moment of great peril, for despite the traditionary awe that had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which spiritual fingers were said to play on it, the devoted sister had solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford, poor Hepsiba, poor harpsichord. All three would have been miserable together. By some good agency, possibly by the unrecognized interposition of the long-buried Alice herself, the threatening calamity was averted. But the worst of all, the hardest stroke of fate for Hepsiba to endure, and perhaps for Clifford too, was his invincible distaste for her appearance. Her features never the most agreeable and now harsh with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake. Her dress and especially her turban, the queer and quaint manners which had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude, such being the poor gentle woman's outward characteristics. It is no great marvel, although the mournfulest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the beautiful was feigned to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would doubly press Hepsiba's hand in fervent recognition of all her lavished love and close his eyes, but not so much to die as to be constrained to look no longer on her face. Poor Hepsiba. She took counsel with herself what might be done and thought of putting ribbons in her turban. But by the instant rush of several guardian angels was withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety. To be brief, besides Hepsiba's disadvantages of person, there was an uncouthness pervading all her deeds, a clumsy something that could but ill adapt itself for use and not at all for ornament. She was a grief to Clifford and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin turned to Phoebe. No groveling jealousy was in her heart. Had it pleased heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded her for all the past by a joy with no bright tents indeed, but deep and true and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be. She therefore turned to Phoebe and resigned the task into the young girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully as she did everything, but with no sense of omission to perform and succeeding all the better for that same simplicity. By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life of her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the house of the seven gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there. The gnawing tooth of the dry rot was stayed among the old timbers of its skeleton frame. The dust had ceased to settle down so densely from the antique ceilings upon the floors and furniture of the rooms below. Or at any rate, there was a little housewife as light-footed as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else lonely and desolate apartments, the heavy, breathless scent which death had left in more than one of the bed chambers ever since his visits of long ago. These were less powerful than the purifying influence scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phoebe. If there had been, the old pension house was the very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of otter of rose and one of Hepsiba's huge ironbound trunks, diffusing its fragrance to the various articles of linen and wrought lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As every article in the Great Trunk was the sweeter for the rose scent, so did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepsiba and Clifford, somber as they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that offered themselves around her and to think the thought proper for the moment and to sympathize now with the twittering gaiety of the robins in the pear tree and now to such a depth as she could with Hepsiba's dark anxiety or the vague moan of her brother. This facile adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best preservative. A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence but is seldom regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for herself amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the mistress of the house and also by the effect which she produced on a character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony frame and limbs of Hepsiba as compared with the tiny lifesomeness of Phoebe's figure were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral weight and substance respectively of the woman and the girl. To the guest, to Hepsiba's brother or cousin Clifford as Phoebe now began to call him she was especially necessary. Not that he could ever be said to converse with her or often manifest in any other very definite mode his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless pacing the room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his movements or else would sit broodingly in his great chair resting his head on his hands and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of ill humor whenever Hepsiba endeavored to arouse him. Phoebe's presence and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one was usually all that he required. Indeed such was the native gush and play of her spirit that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its flow. She possessed the gift of song and that too so naturally that you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it or what master had taught her as of asking the same questions about a bird and whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long as Phoebe sang she might stray at her own will about the house. Clifford was content whether the sweet airy homeliness of her tones came down from the upper chambers or along the passageway from the shop or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear tree inward from the garden with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly with the gentle pleasure gleaming over his face brighter now and now a little dimmer as the song happened to float near him or was more remotely heard. It pleased him best however when she sat on a low footstool at his knee. It is perhaps remarkable considering her temperament that Phoebe oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gaiety. But the young and happy are not ill-pleased to temper their life with a transparent shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song moreover came sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit and was somehow so interfused with the quality then sequired that one's heart felt all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth and the sacred presence of darkness fortune would have jarred harshly and irreverently with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepsibus and her brother's life. Therefore it was well that Phoebe so often chose sad themes and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she was singing them. Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how capable of imbibing pleasant tents and gleams of cheerful light from all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful while she sat by him. A beauty not precisely real, even in its utmost manifestation in which a painter would have watched long to seize and fix upon his canvas and after all in vain, beauty nevertheless that was not a mere dream would sometimes play upon and illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate, it transfigured him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair and those furrows with their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow and so compressed as with the futile effort to crowd in all the tale that the whole inscription was made illegible. These for the moment vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man some shadow of what he was meant to be. A non as age came stealing like a sad twilight back over his figure, you would have felt tempted to hold an argument with destiny and affirm that either this being should not have been made mortal or mortal existence should have been tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having drawn breath at all. The world never wanted him, but as he had breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that tend to feed excessively upon the beautiful, let their earthly fate be as lenient as it may. Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the reality and simplicity and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style was indispensable. Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily of a harsh voice and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts beneath this unfortunate exterior. And still, so long as she wore the guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford and depressed him by her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful, nothing prettier at least, was ever made than Phoebe. And therefore, to this man whose whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence here to fore, and until both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream, whose images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and been frozen like the pictures of secluded artists into the chillest ideality. To him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world. Persons who have wandered or been expelled out of the common track of things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain top or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her, that very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate, the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it, instinctively pines after. A home. She was real. Holding her hand, you felt something. A tender something. A substance and a warm one. And so long as you should feel its grasp soft as it was, you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion. By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an explanation of an often suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsmen, as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because probably at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse, but he finds it dreary to descend and be a stranger. There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birth to hers. On Clifford's part, it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never coiffed the cup of passionate love and knew that it was now too late. He knew it with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe without being paternal was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex and saw the ripeness of her lips and the virginal development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit tree, had their effect on him and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure. At such moments, for the effect was seldom more than momentary. The half torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long silent harp is full of sound when the musician's fingers sweep across it. But after all, it seemed rather a perception or a sympathy than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story. He listened to her as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, and requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel that most pitied him to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home to his conception, so that this mere symbol or lifelike picture had almost the comfort of reality. But we strive in vain to put the idea into words, no adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is attainable. This being made only for happiness and here to force so miserably failing to be happy, his tendencies so hideously thwarted that some unknown time ago, the delicate spring of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way and he was now imbecile. This poor, forlorn voyager from the islands of the blessed in a frail bark on a tempestuous sea had been flung by the last mountain wave of his shipwreck into a quiet harbor. There as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rosebud had come to his nostrils and as the odor's will had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight ethereal rapture into his soul and expires. And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girls was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character. The path which would best have suited her was the well-worn track of ordinary life, the companions in whom she would most have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery which enveloped Clifford so far as it affected her at all was an annoyance rather than the peaking charm which many women might have found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into play not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation nor so much even by the finer graces of his character as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers. She gave him an affectionate regard because he needed so much love and seemed to have received so little. With the ready tact, the result of ever active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience she ignored and thereby kept their intercourse healthy by the incautious but as it were heaven directed freedom of her whole conduct. The sick in mind and perhaps in body are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them. They are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of pure air. She impregnated it too not with the wildflower scent for wildness was no trait of hers but with the perfume of garden roses, pinks and other blossoms of much sweetness which nature and man have consented together and making grow from summer to summer and from century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with Clifford and such the delight that he inhaled from her. Yet it must be said her petals sometimes drooped a little and consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more thoughtful than her to four. Looking aside at Clifford's face and seeing the dim unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost quenched she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth? This veil under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed and through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world? Or was its great texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles and would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one. Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on Clifford's character that when her involuntary conjecture together with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story had gradually taught her the fact it had no terrible effect upon her. Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might she knew cousin Clifford too well or fancied so ever to shudder at the touch of his thin, delicate fingers. Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate the routine of life had established itself with the good deal of uniformity in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after breakfast it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair. Nor, unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro until well towards noon day. These hours of drowsy head were the season of the old gentle woman's attendance on her brother while Phoebe took charge of the shop. An arrangement which the public speedily understood and evinced their decided preference of the younger shop woman by the multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs. Dinner over, Hepsaba took her knitting work a long stocking of gray yarn for her brother's winter wear and with a sigh and a scowl of affectionate farewell to Clifford and a gesture in joining watchfulness on Phoebe went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the young girl's turn to be the nurse, the guardian, the playmate, or whatever is the fitter phrase of the gray-haired man. End of chapter nine of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. Chapter 10, this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 10 of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. The Pension Garden. Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being and which sluggishly counseled him to sit in his morning chair till even tide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor or summer house that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The hop vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriously over the sides of the little edifice and made an interior of verdant seclusion with innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden. Here, sometimes in this green play place of flickering light, Phoebe read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a literary turn had supplied her with works of fiction in pamphlet form and a few volumes of poetry in altogether a different style and taste from those which Hepsiba selected for his amusement. Small thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in any degree more successful than her elderly cousins. Phoebe's voice had always a pretty music in it and could either enliven Clifford by its sparkle and gaiety of tone or soothe him by a continued flow of pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions in which the country girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply absorbed, interested her strange auditor very little or not at all. Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and pathos were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford. Either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or because his own griefs were a touchstone of reality that few feigned emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into appeal of Mary Laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy, but often her respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear, a maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe, dropped upon some melancholy page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity or else grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely, too, is not the world sad enough and genuine earnest without making a pastime of mock sorrows? With poetry, it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and subsidence of the rhythm and the happily recurring rhyme. Nora was Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry, not perhaps where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the awakening spell might lurk, but on raising her eyes from the page to Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware by the light breaking through it that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward, because when the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power and groped about for them as if a blind man should go seeking his lost eyesight. It pleased him more and was better for his inward welfare that Phoebe should talk and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His feelings for flowers was very exquisite and seemed not so much a taste as an emotion. He was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intensely observing it and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face as if the garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was there a delight in the flower's perfume or pleasure in its beautiful form and the delicacy or brightness of its hue, but Clifford's enjoyment was accompanied with the perception of life, character and individuality that made him love these blossoms of the garden as if they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget and learn to despise it in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford too had long forgotten it, but found it again now as he slowly revived from the chill torpor of his life. It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually come to pass in that secluded garden spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for them. She had seen or heard a bee there on the first day of her acquaintance with the place and often almost continually indeed since then the bees kept coming thither, heaven knows why or by what pertinacious desire for far-fetched sweets when no doubt there were broad clover fields and all kinds of garden growth much nearer home than this. Thither the bees came however and plunged into the squash blossoms as if there were no other squash vines within a long day's flight or as if the soil of Hepsiba's garden gave its productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards wanted in order to impart the Hymetis odor to their whole hive of New England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny buzzing murmur in the heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with the joyful sense of warmth and blue sky and green grass and of God's free air in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town. God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the rich summer with them in requital of a little honey. When the bean vines began to flower on the poles, there was one particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The daguerreotype-ist had found these beans in a garret over one of the seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some horticultural pension of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them the next summer, but was himself first sown in death's garden ground. By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such ancient seeds, Hallgrave had planted some of them and the result of his experiment was a splendid row of bean vines, clambering early to the full height of the poles and arraying them from top to bottom in a spiral profusion of red blossoms. And ever since the unfolding first bud, a multitude of hummingbirds had been attracted thither. At times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms, there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air, a thumb's bigness of burnished plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean poles. It was with indescribable interest and even more than childish delight that Clifford watched the hummingbirds. He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better, all the while too motioning Phoebe to be quiet and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had not merely grown young, he was a child again. Hepsiba, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head with the strange mingling of the mother and sister and of pleasure and sadness in her aspect. She said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the hummingbirds came, always from his babyhood, and that his delight in them had been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering beans which the hummingbird sought far and wide and which had not grown in the pension garden before for forty years on the very summer of Clifford's return. Then would the tears stand in poor Hepsiba's eyes or overflow them with a too abundant gush so that she was famed to betake herself into some corner lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as it did, it was a kind of Indian summer with the mist in its balmyest sunshine and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the difference to be recognized. With the mysterious and terrible past which had annihilated his memory and a blank future before him, he had only this visionary and impalpable now which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms, laid darkly behind his pleasure and knew it to be a baby play which he was to toy and trifle with instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness that he was an example and representative of that great class of people whom an inexplicable providence is continually putting at cross purposes with the world, breaking what seems its own promise in their nature, withholding their proper food and setting poison before them for a banquet. And thus, when it might so easily, as one would think, have been adjusted otherwise, making their existence a strangeness, a solitude and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to be wretched as one learns a foreign tongue. And now, with the lesson thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness. Frequently, there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes. Take my hand, Phoebe, he would say, and pinch it hard with your little fingers. Give me a rose that I may press its thorns and prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain. Evidently, he desired this prick of a trifling anguish in order to assure himself by that quality which he best knew to be real that the garden and the seven weather-beaten gables and Hepsiba's scow and Phoebe's smile were real likewise. Without the syniot in his flesh, he could have attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit until even that poor sustenance was exhausted. The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy. Else he must hesitate to give details so minute and incidents apparently so trifling as are essential to make up the idea of this garden life. It was the Eden of a thundersmitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original Adam was expelled. One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the pension family. In compliance with the whim of Clifford, as it troubled him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty and now roamed at will about the garden, doing some little mischief but hindered from escape by buildings on three sides and the difficult peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their abundant leisure on the margin of Mall's well, which was haunted by a kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates, and the brackish water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world was so greatly esteemed by these fowls that they might be seen tasting, turning up their heads and smacking their bills with precisely the air of wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. They're generally quiet, yet often brisk and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or sometimes in soliloquy, as they scratched worms out of the rich black soil or pecked at such plants as suited their taste, had such a domestic tone that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish a regular interchange of ideas about household matters human and galinatious. All hens are well worth studying for the pecancy and rich variety of their manners, but by no possibility can there have been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities of their whole line of progenitors derived through an unbroken succession of eggs, or else this individual Chanticleer and his two wives had grown to be humorists and a little crack-brained with all on account of their solitary way of life and out of sympathy for Hepsiba, their lady patroness. Clear indeed, they looked. Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two stilt-like legs with the dignity of interminable descent in all his gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge. His two wives were about the size of quails, and as for the one chicken, it looked small enough to be still in the egg, and at the same time sufficiently old, withered, wisened, and experienced to have been founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the family, it rather seemed to have aggregated itself into the ages, not only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers and foremothers whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's continuance, or at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could have indicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched and her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck when the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass under the squash leaves, her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it beneath her wing, her note of ill-concealed fear an obstreperous defiance when she saw her arch enemy, a neighbor's cat on the top of the high fence. One or the other of these sounds was to be heard at almost every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother hen did. Theebie, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined its hereditary marks, the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs, the little biped, as she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betoken the oddities of the pension family and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clues generally are. It was a feathered riddle, a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been idle. The second of Chanticleur's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had been in a state of heavy despondency, caused as it afterwards appeared by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head and the cock of her eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden, croaking to herself all the while with inexpressible complacency. It was made evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her, carried something about her person, the worth of which was not to be estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was a prodigious cackling and a graduation of Chanticleur and all his family, including the wisened chicken, who appeared to understand the matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That afternoon, Phoebe found a diminutive egg, not in the regular nest, it was far too precious to be trusted there, but cunningly hidden under the current bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepsiva, on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor for which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance, perhaps of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a teaspoon. It must have been in reference to this outrage that Chanticleur, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon the offended foul stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her peace with an offering of spice cake, and next to snails was the delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste. We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that flowed through the garden of the pension house, but we deem it pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights because they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth smell in them and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular propensity, for example, to hang over malls well and look at the constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation of the water over the mosaic work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He said that faces looked upward to him there, beautiful faces, arrayed and bewitching smiles, each momentary face so fair and rosy and every smile so sunny that he felt wronged at its departure until the same flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly cry out, the dark face gazes at me and be miserable the whole day afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's side, could see nothing of all this, neither the beauty nor the ugliness, but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face that so troubled Clifford was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of the damson trees and breaking the inner light of malls well. The truth was, however, that his fancy, reviving faster than his will and judgment and always stronger than they, created shapes of loveliness that were symbolic of his native character and now and then a stern and dreadful shape that typified his fate. On Sundays after Phoebe had been at church, for the girl had a church-going conscience and would hardly have been at ease had she missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction. After church time, therefore, there was ordinarily a sober little festival in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hephseba, and Phoebe, two guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who in spite of his consociation with reformers and his other queer and questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hephseba's regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable Uncle Venner and a clean shirt and a broadcloth coat, more respectable than his ordinary wear, and as much as it was neatly patched on each elbow, it might be called an entire garment, except for a slight inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse for the sake of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavour of a frostbitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of the intermediate degrees, and moreover, as Clifford's young manhood had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful, now in opposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact, it was sometimes observable that Clifford half willfully hid from himself the consciousness of being stricken in years and cherished visions of an earthly future still before him. Visions, however, too indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment, though doubtless by depression, when any casual incident or recollection made him sensible of the withered leaf. So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the ruinous arbor. Hepsiba, stately as ever at heart and yielding not an inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more as justifying a princess-like condescension, exhibited a not ungraceful hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist and took sage counsel, lady as she was, with the wood sawyer, the messenger of everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at street corners and other posts equally well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom to the town-pump to give water. Miss Hepsiba, ma'am, said he once, after they had all been cheerful together, I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I retire to my farm. Uncle Venner, observed Clifford in a drowsy inward tone, is always talking about his farm, but I have a better scheme for him by and by. We shall see. Mr. Clifford Pension, said the man of patches, you may scheme for me as much as you please, but I'm not going to give up this one scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if Providence was not bound to take care of me. And at all events the city wouldn't be. I'm one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us all, and eternity long enough. Why so they are, Uncle Venner remarked Phoebe after a pause, for she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this concluding apathom. But for this short life of ours, one would like a house and a moderate garden spot of one's own. It appears to me, said the daguerreotypist smiling, that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom, only they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the systematizing Frenchman. Come, Phoebe, said Hepsiba, it is time to bring the currents. And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of bread and a china bowl of currents, freshly gathered from the bushes and crushed with sugar. These, with water, but not from the fountain of ill omen close at hand, constituted all the entertainment. Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuler than most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend. Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes, there was now and then an expression not sinister but questionable. As if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a youthful and unconnected adventurer might be supposed to have. With great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task of enlivening the party, and with so much success that even dark-hued Hepsiba threw off one tent of melancholy and made what shift she could with the remaining portion. Vibi said to herself, how pleasant he can be! As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his countenance in the way of his profession, not metaphorically, be it understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's studio. Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, drew to be the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those upquivering flashes of the spirit to which minds in an abnormal state are liable, or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening and the sympathy of this little circle of not-unkindly souls, it was perhaps natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become animated and show itself readily responsive to what was said around him. But he gave out his own thoughts likewise, with an airy and fanciful glow, so that they glistened as it were, through the arbor, and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with such tokens of acute, although partial, intelligence. But as the sunlight left the peaks of the seven gables, so did the excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was. I want my happiness. At last he murmured, hoarsely and indistinctly, hardly shaping out the words. Many, many years have I waited for it. It is late. It is late. I want my happiness. Alas, poor Clifford, you are old and worn with troubles that ought never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile, a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is, though some in less degree or less perceptibly than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in store for you, unless you're quiet home in the old family residence with the faithful Hepsiba and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the Degarotipist deserve to be called happiness. Why not? If not the thing itself, it is marvelously like it and the more so for that ethereal and intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Mermor not, question not, but make the most of it.