aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down
Pyncheon 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 duodecimos, 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 Pyncheon
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 a rapid glimpse
at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the
prevalent east wind,—pointing, too, here and

-1-

of him are preserved, was characterized by
an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule,
on the other hand, though an obscure man,
was stubborn in the defence 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 primeval 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
Pyncheon's claim were not unduly
stretched, in order to make it cover the small
metes and bounds of Matthew Maule. What
greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the
fact that this controversy between two ill-
matched antagonists—at a period,
moreover, laud it 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 plough over the little area of his
habitation, and obliterate his place and
memory from among men.

Old Matthew Maule, 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 who take upon themselves to be
leaders of the people, are fully liable to all
the passionate error that has ever
characterized the maddest mob.

-2-

many generations of his posterity over the
spot first covered by the log-built hut of
Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of
the head among the village gossips. Without
absolutely expressing a doubt whether the
stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of
conscience and integrity throughout the
proceedings which have 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 Pyncheon blood were to be
born. The terror and ugliness of Maule'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 bestrewn with the virgin forest
leaves,—why should Colonel Pyncheon
prefer a site that had already been accurst?

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 air, it might have moved
him somewhat; but he was ready to
encounter an evil spirit on his own ground.
Endowed with commonsense, 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
finer 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

-3-

longpast epoch, and as the scene of events
more full of human 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. The impression of its actual state,
at this distance of a hundred and sixty
years, darkens inevitably through the picture
which we would fain 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 Rev. 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, in 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.

Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon 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

-4-

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 statelier rooms,—hospitable
alike to all, but still with a scrutinizing regard
to the high or low degree of each. Velvet
garments sombre but rich, stiffly plaited
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 tradesman, with his
plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
jerkin, stealing awe-stricken 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
stately 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
Pyncheon'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 side-saddle, 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;

-5-

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 reecho 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
Pyncheon. 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, forsooth!—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 silken garments of the
ladies, and waved the long curls of the
gentlemen'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 wherefore, nor of
what—had all at once fallen over the
company.

-6-

to find his way into every human
dwelling,—thus early had Death stepped
across the threshold of the House of the
Seven Gables!

Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and
mysterious end made a vast deal of noise in
its day. There were many rumors, some of
which have vaguely drifted down to the
present time, how that appearances
indicated violence; that there were the
marks of fingers on his throat, and the print
of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that
his peaked beard was dishevelled, as if it
had been fiercely clutched and pulled. 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 clambering 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
mouldered 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 was said to have seen at the Colonel's
throat, but which vanished away, as he
advanced farther into the room. Certain it is,
however, that there was a great
consultation and dispute of doctors over the
dead body. One,—John Swinnerton 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 bewilderment of mind in
these erudite physicians, certainly causes it

-7-

come into 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—comprised 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
Pyncheon 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 Pyncheon, provident
and sagacious as he was, had allowed to
go at loose ends. So far as the prospective
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
Pyncheons, 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

-8-

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
a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At
two or three epochs, 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 Pyncheon
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 Maule, it is to be
feared, trode downward from his own age
to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep,
all the way, on the conscience of a
Pyncheon. 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
Pyncheon 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
Pyncheon 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

-9-

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 Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, 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 dwelt; 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, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the
Pyncheon of that epoch, adopting the royal
side, became a refugee; but 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
Pyncheon 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
Pyncheon. 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

-10-

Pyncheon 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 testator to send down his estate
in the line marked out by custom so
immemorial that it looks like nature. In all the
Pyncheons, 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
at once reformed, and made himself an
exceedingly respectable member of
society. In fact, he showed more of the
Pyncheon 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.

-11-

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 ante-Revolutionary
days, when the aristocracy could venture to
be proud, and the low were content to be
abased. Thus the Maules, at all events, kept
their resentments within their own breasts.
They were generally poverty-stricken;
always plebeian 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
almshouse 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 plebeian. For thirty
years past, neither town-record, nor
gravestone, nor the directory, nor the
knowledge or memory of man, bore any
trace of Matthew Maule'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.

-12-

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 plodding
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 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
sombre 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
Pyncheon 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 Pyncheon, and,
though now fourscore 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

-13-

ancient date. This same shop-door had
been a subject of No slight mortification to
the present occupant of the august
Pyncheon House, as well as to some of her
predecessors. The matter is disagreeably
delicate to handle; but, since the reader
must needs be let into the secret, he will
please to understand, that, about a century
ago, the head of the Pyncheons 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 Pyncheon's mode of setting
about his commercial operations; it was
whispered, that, with his own hands, all
beruffled as they were, he used to give
change for a 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 once been 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 shop-
keeper, 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
poring over the dingy pages of his day-

-14-

ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, 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 prays 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 of
spasmodic jerks then, all must close 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 Hepzibah,
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
matutinal 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 sole
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 escritoire,
and is probably looking at a certain
miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect
style, and representing a face worthy of no

-15-

show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and
arrangement of the room which Hepzibah
entered, after descending the stairs. It was
a low-studded room, with a beam across
the ceiling, panelled 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 Pyncheon territory at
the eastward, not engraved, but the
handiwork of some skilful old draughtsman,
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

-16-

retained, while her visage was growing so
perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had
Hepzibah ever any hardihood, except what
came from the very warmest nook in her
affections.

All this time, however, we are loitering
faintheartedly on the threshold of our story.
In very truth, we have an invincible
reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon 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 Hepzibah'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

-17-

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.
Pyncheon, 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 Aolus that morning,—and stept
across the room on tiptoe, as is the
customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she
opened a door that communicated with the
shop, just now so elaborately described.
Owing to the projection of the upper
story—and still more to the thick shadow of
the Pyncheon 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 from Miss
Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
threshold, peering towards the window with
her near-sighted 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 dark-
arrayed, 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

-18-

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 a
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 Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady—two
hundred years old, on this side of the water,
and thrice as 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 Pyncheon
Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the
Pyncheon House, where she has spent all
her days,—reduced. Now, in 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 near-
sightedness, 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

-19-

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
Hepzibah 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
heretofore. The town appeared to be
waking up. A baker's cart had already
rattled through the street, 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 peal
of a fisherman's conch shell was heard far
off, around the corner. None of these tokens
escaped Hepzibah'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
Hepzibah 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

-20-

Chapter 3: The First Customer

MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the
oaken elbow-chair, with her hands over her
face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking
of the heart which most persons have
experienced, when the image of hope itself
seems ponderously moulded of lead, on the
eve of an enterprise at once doubtful and
momentous. She was suddenly startled by
the tinkling alarum—high, sharp, and
irregular—of a little bell. The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at
cock-crow; for she was an enslaved spirit,
and this the talisman to which she owed
obedience. This little bell,—to speak in
plainer terms,—being fastened over the
shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate
by means of a steel spring, and thus convey
notice to the inner regions of the house
when any customer should cross the
threshold. Its ugly and spiteful little din
(heard now for the first time, perhaps, since
Hepzibah's periwigged predecessor had
retired from trade) at once set every nerve
of her body in responsive and tumultuous
vibration. The crisis was upon her! Her first
customer was at the door!

Without giving herself time for a second
thought, she rushed into the shop, pale,
wild, desperate in gesture and expression,
scowling portentously, and looking far
better qualified to do fierce battle with a
housebreaker than to stand smiling behind
the counter, bartering small wares for a
copper recompense. Any ordinary
customer, indeed, would have turned his
back and fled. And yet there was nothing
fierce in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had
she, at the moment, a single bitter thought
against the world at large, or one individual
man or woman. She wished them all well,
but wished, too, that she herself were done
with them, and in her quiet grave.

-21-

genuine sympathy. So it proved with poor
Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young
man's smile,—looking so much the brighter
on a thoughtful face,—and heard his kindly
tone, she broke first into a hysteric giggle
and then began to sob.

"Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as
she could speak, "I never can go through
with it Never, never, never I wish I were
dead, and in the old family tomb, with all my
forefathers! With my father, and my mother,
and my sister. Yes, and with my brother,
who had far better find me there than here!
The world is too chill and hard,—and I am too
old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"

"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the
young man quietly, "these feelings will not
trouble you any longer, after you are once
fairly in the midst of your enterprise. They
are unavoidable at this moment, standing,
as you do, on the outer verge of your long
seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly
shapes, which you will soon find to be as
unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's
story-book. I find nothing so singular in life,
as that everything appears to lose its
substance the instant one actually grapples
with it. So it will be with what you think so
terrible."

"But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah
piteously. "I was going to say, a lady,—but I
consider that as past."

"Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the
artist, a strange gleam of half-hidden
sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of
his manner. "Let it go You are the better
without it. I speak frankly, my dear Miss
Pyncheon! for are we not friends? I look
upon this as one of the fortunate days of
your life. It ends an epoch and begins one.
Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually
chilling in your veins as you sat aloof, within

-22-

house was built, than you are performing in
it to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had
always acted so nobly, I doubt whether an
old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you
told me once, would have had much weight
with Providence against them."

"Ah!—no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased
at this allusion to the sombre dignity of an
inherited curse. "If old Maule's ghost, or a
descendant of his, could see me behind the
counter to-day. he would call it the fulfillment
of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your
kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my
utmost to be a good shop-keeper."

"Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have
the pleasure of being your first customer. I
am about taking a walk to the seashore,
before going to my rooms, where I misuse
Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out
human features through its agency. A few of
those biscuits, dipt in sea-water, will be
just what I need for breakfast. What is the
price of half a dozen?"

"Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied
Hepzibah, with a manner of antique
stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent
a kind of grace. She put the biscuits into his
hand, but rejected the compensation. "A
Pyncheon must not, at all events under her
forefathers' roof, receive money for a
morsel of bread from her only friend!"

Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for
the moment, with spirits not quite so much
depressed. Soon, however, they had
subsided nearly to their former dead level.
With a beating heart, she listened to the
footsteps of early passengers, which now
began to be frequent along the street. Once
or twice they seemed to linger; these
strangers, or neighbors, as the case might
be, were looking at the display of toys and
petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-

-23-

enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he
had ever so great a mind to trade with her.
People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls
dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure
ugliness of temper."

"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked
the other man. "These sour-tempered folks
are mostly handy at business, and know
pretty well what they are about. But, as you
say, I don't think she'll do much. This
business of keeping cent-shops is
overdone, like all other kinds of trade,
handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my
cost! My wife kept a cent-shop three
months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."

"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a
tone as if he were shaking his head,—"poor
business."

For some reason or other, not very easy to
analyze, there had hardly been so bitter a
pang in all her previous misery about the
matter as what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on
overhearing the above conversation. The
testimony in regard to her scowl was
frightfully important; it seemed to hold up
her image wholly relieved from the false
light of her self-partialities, and so hideous
that she dared not look at it. She was
absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and
idle effect that her setting up shop—an event
of such breathless interest to
herself—appeared to have upon the public,
of which these two men were the nearest
representatives. A glance; a passing word
or two; a coarse laugh; and she was
doubtless forgotten before they turned the
corner. They cared nothing for her dignity,
and just as little for her degradation. Then,
also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from
the sure wisdom of experience, fell upon
her half-dead hope like a clod into a grave.
The man's wife had already tried the same
experiment, and failed! How could the born,

-24-

attached to the same steel spring, for it
went through a series of sharp jerks, in
unison with the sound. The door was thrust
open, although no human form was
perceptible on the other side of the half-
window. Hepzibah, nevertheless, stood at a
gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very
much as if she had summoned up an evil
spirit, and were afraid, yet resolved, to
hazard the encounter.

"Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally.
"Now is my hour of need!"

The door, which moved with difficulty on its
creaking and rusty hinges, being forced
quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin
became apparent, with cheeks as red as an
apple. He was clad rather shabbily (but, as
it seemed, more owing to his mother's
carelessness than his father's poverty), in a
blue apron, very wide and short trousers,
shoes somewhat out at the toes, and a chip
hat, with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking
through its crevices. A book and a small
slate, under his arm, indicated that he was
on his way to school. He stared at Hepzibah
a moment, as an elder customer than
himself would have been likely enough to
do, not knowing what to make of the tragic
attitude and queer scowl wherewith she
regarded him.

"Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight
of a personage so little formidable,—"well,
my child, what did you wish for?"

"That Jim Crow there in the window,"
answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and
pointing to the gingerbread figure that had
attracted his notice, as he loitered along to
school; "the one that has not a broken foot."

So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and,
taking the effigy from the shop-window,
delivered it to her first customer.

-25-

cent?"

The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a
true-born Yankee, would have preferred the
better bargain to the worse. Looking
somewhat chagrined, he put the coin into
Hepzibah's hand, and departed, sending
the second Jim Crow in quest of the former
one. The new shop-keeper dropped the
first solid result of her commercial
enterprise into the till. It was done! The
sordid stain of that copper coin could never
be washed away from her palm. The little
schoolboy, aided by the impish figure of the
negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable
ruin. The structure of ancient aristocracy
had been demolished by him, even as if his
childish gripe had torn down the seven-
gabled mansion. Now let Hepzibah turn the
old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to
the wall, and take the map of her Eastern
territory to kindle the kitchen fire, and blow
up the flame with the empty breath of her
ancestral traditions! What had she to do with
ancestry? Nothing; no more than with
posterity! No lady, now, but simply
Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn old maid, and
keeper of a cent-shop!

Nevertheless, even while she paraded
these ideas somewhat ostentatiously
through her mind, it is altogether surprising
what a calmness had come over her. The
anxiety and misgivings which had
tormented her, whether asleep or in
melancholy day-dreams, ever since her
project began to take an aspect of solidity,
had now vanished quite away. She felt the
novelty of her position, indeed, but no
longer with disturbance or affright. Now and
then, there came a thrill of almost youthful
enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of
a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long
torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the
strength that we do not know of! The

-26-

mother to match a skein of cotton thread, of
a peculiar hue, took one that the near-
sighted old lady pronounced extremely like,
but soon came running back, with a blunt
and cross message, that it would not do,
and, besides, was very rotten! Then, there
was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old
but haggard, and already with streaks of
gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one
of those women, naturally delicate, whom
you at once recognize as worn to death by a
brute—probably a drunken brute—of a
husband, and at least nine children. She
wanted a few pounds of flour, and offered
the money, which the decayed
gentlewoman silently rejected, and gave
the poor soul better measure than if she had
taken it. Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue
cotton frock, much soiled, came in and
bought a pipe, filling the whole shop,
meanwhile, with the hot odor of strong
drink, not only exhaled in the torrid
atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of
his entire system, like an inflammable gas. It
was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that
this was the husband of the care-wrinkled
woman. He asked for a paper of tobacco;
and as she had neglected to provide herself
with the article, her brutal customer dashed
down his newly-bought pipe and left the
shop, muttering some unintelligible words,
which had the tone and bitterness of a
curse. Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her
eyes, unintentionally scowling in the face of
Providence!

No less than five persons, during the
forenoon, inquired for ginger-beer, or root-
beer, or any drink of a similar brewage,
and, obtaining nothing of the kind, went off
in an exceedingly bad humor. Three of them
left the door open, and the other two pulled it
so spitefully in going out that the little bell
played the very deuce with Hepzibah's
nerves. A round, bustling, fire-ruddy
housewife of the neighborhood burst

-27-

innocuous it might be at other times,
Hepzibah's contortion of brow served her in
good stead.

"I never was so frightened in my life!" said
the curious customer, in describing the
incident to one of her acquaintances.
"She's a real old vixen, take my word of it!
She says little, to be sure; but if you could
only see the mischief in her eye!"

On the whole, therefore, her new
experience led our decayed gentlewoman
to very disagreeable conclusions as to the
temper and manners of what she termed
the lower classes, whom heretofore she
had looked down upon with a gentle and
pitying complaisance, as herself occupying
a sphere of unquestionable superiority. But,
unfortunately, she had likewise to struggle
against a bitter emotion of a directly
opposite kind: a sentiment of virulence, we
mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
it had so recently been her pride to belong.
When a lady, in a delicate and costly
summer garb, with a floating veil and
gracefully swaying gown, and, altogether,
an ethereal lightness that made you look at
her beautifully slippered feet, to see
whether she trod on the dust or floated in the
air,—when such a vision happened to pass
through this retired street, leaving it tenderly
and delusively fragrant with her passage,
as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been
borne along,—then again, it is to be feared,
old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-
sightedness.

"For what end," thought she, giving vent to
that feeling of hostility which is the only real
abasement of the poor in presence of the
rich,—"for what good end, in the wisdom of
Providence, does that woman live? Must
the whole world toil, that the palms of her
hands may be kept white and delicate?"

-28-

character—which showed itself so strikingly
in everything about him, and the effect of
which we seek to convey to the reader—went
no deeper than his station, habits of life,
and external circumstances. One perceived
him to be a personage of marked influence
and authority; and, especially, you could
feel just as certain that he was opulent as if
he had exhibited his bank account, or as if
you had seen him touching the twigs of the
Pyncheon Elm, and, Midas-like,
transmuting them to gold.

In his youth, he had probably been
considered a handsome man; at his
present age, his brow was too heavy, his
temples too bare, his remaining hair too
gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
compressed, to bear any relation to mere
personal beauty. He would have made a
good and massive portrait; better now,
perhaps, than at any previous period of his
life, although his look might grow positively
harsh in the process of being fixed upon the
canvas. The artist would have found it
desirable to study his face, and prove its
capacity for varied expression; to darken it
with a frown,—to kindle it up with a smile.

While the elderly gentleman stood looking at
the Pyncheon House, both the frown and the
smile passed successively over his
countenance. His eye rested on the shop-
window, and putting up a pair of gold-
bowed spectacles, which he held in his
hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's little
arrangement of toys and commodities. At
first it seemed not to please him,—nay, to
cause him exceeding displeasure,—and yet,
the very next moment, he smiled. While the
latter expression was yet on his lips, he
caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had
involuntarily bent forward to the window;
and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency
and benevolence. He bowed, with a happy

-29-

house. In one sense, this picture had almost
faded into the canvas, and hidden itself
behind the duskiness of age; in another,
she could not but fancy that it had been
growing more prominent and strikingly
expressive, ever since her earliest
familiarity with it as a child. For, while the
physical outline and substance were
darkening away from the beholder's eye,
the bold, hard, and, at the same time,
indirect character of the man seemed to be
brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such
an effect may occasionally be observed in
pictures of antique date. They acquire a
look which an artist (if he have anything like
the complacency of artists nowadays)
would never dream of presenting to a
patron as his own characteristic
expression, but which, nevertheless, we at
once recognize as reflecting the unlovely
truth of a human soul. In such cases, the
painter's deep conception of his subject's
inward traits has wrought itself into the
essence of the picture, and is seen after the
superficial coloring has been rubbed off by
time.

While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah
trembled under its eye. Her hereditary
reverence made her afraid to judge the
character of the original so harshly as a
perception of the truth compelled her to do.
But still she gazed, because the face of the
picture enabled her—at least, she fancied
so—to read more accurately, and to a greater
depth, the face which she had just seen in
the street.

"This is the very man!" murmured she to
herself. "Let Jaffrey Pyncheon smile as he
will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a
skull-cap, and a band, and a black cloak,
and a Bible in one hand and a sword in the
other,—then let Jaffrey smile as he
might,—nobody would doubt that it was the
old Pyncheon come again. He has proved

-30-

whom, for a great many years past, she had
suffered to be a kind of familiar of the
house. He was an immemorial personage,
who seemed always to have had a white
head and wrinkles, and never to have
possessed but a single tooth, and that a
half-decayed one, in the front of the upper
jaw. Well advanced as Hepzibah was, she
could not remember when Uncle Venner, as
the neighborhood called him, had not gone
up and down the street, stooping a little and
drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or
pavement. But still there was something
tough and vigorous about him, that not only
kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to
fill a place which would else have been
vacant in the apparently crowded world. To
go of errands with his slow and shuffling
gait, which made you doubt how he ever
was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small
household's foot or two of firewood, or
knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a
pine board for kindling-stuff; in summer, to
dig the few yards of garden ground
appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and
share the produce of his labor at the halves;
in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed,
or along the clothes-line; such were some
of the essential offices which Uncle Venner
performed among at least a score of
families. Within that circle, he claimed the
same sort of privilege, and probably felt as
much warmth of interest, as a clergyman
does in the range of his parishioners. Not
that he laid claim to the tithe pig; but, as an
analogous mode of reverence, he went his
rounds, every morning, to gather up the
crumbs of the table and overflowings of the
dinner-pot, as food for a pig of his own.

In his younger days—for, after all, there was a
dim tradition that he had been, not young,
but younger—Uncle Venner was commonly
regarded as rather deficient, than
otherwise, in his wits. In truth he had virtually

-31-

really begun trade! Well, I'm glad to see it.
Young people should never live idle in the
world, nor old ones neither, unless when the
rheumatize gets hold of them. It has given
me warning already; and in two or three
years longer, I shall think of putting aside
business and retiring to my farm. That's
yonder,—the great brick house, you
know,—the workhouse, most folks call it; but I
mean to do my work first, and go there to be
idle and enjoy myself. And I'm glad to see
you beginning to do your work, Miss
Hepzibah!"

"Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah,
smiling; for she always felt kindly towards
the simple and talkative old man. Had he
been an old woman, she might probably
have repelled the freedom, which she now
took in good part. "It is time for me to begin
work, indeed! Or, to speak the truth, I have
just begun when I ought to be giving it up."

"Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!"
answered the old man. "You are a young
woman yet. Why, I hardly thought myself
younger than I am now, it seems so little
while ago since I used to see you playing
about the door of the old house, quite a
small child! Oftener, though, you used to be
sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely
into the street; for you had always a grave
kind of way with you,—a grown-up air, when
you were only the height of my knee. It
seems as if I saw you now; and your
grandfather with his red cloak, and his white
wig, and his cocked hat, and his cane,
coming out of the house, and stepping so
grandly up the street! Those old gentlemen
that grew up before the Revolution used to
put on grand airs. In my young days, the
great man of the town was commonly called
King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure,
but Lady. Nowadays, a man would not dare
to be called King; and if he feels himself a
little above common folks, he only stoops so

-32-

deal to be said in favor of my farm! And,
take it in the autumn, what can be
pleasanter than to spend a whole day on the
sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile,
chatting with somebody as old as one's
self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to
be idle, because even our busy Yankees
never have found out how to put him to any
use? Upon my word, Miss Hepzibah, I
doubt whether I've ever been so
comfortable as I mean to be at my farm,
which most folks call the workhouse. But
you,—you're a young woman yet,—you never
need go there! Something still better will
turn up for you. I'm sure of it!"

Hepzibah fancied that there was something
peculiar in her venerable friend's look and
tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face
with considerable earnestness,
endeavoring to discover what secret
meaning, if any, might be lurking there.
Individuals whose affairs have reached an
utterly desperate crisis almost invariably
keep themselves alive with hopes, so much
the more airily magnificent as they have the
less of solid matter within their grasp
whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the
while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme
of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin
trick of fortune would intervene in her favor.
For example, an uncle—who had sailed for
India fifty years before, and never been
heard of since—might yet return, and adopt
her to be the comfort of his very extreme
and decrepit age, and adorn her with
pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and
turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress
of his unreckonable riches. Or the member
of Parliament, now at the head of the
English branch of the family,—with which the
elder stock, on this side of the Atlantic, had
held little or no intercourse for the last two

-33-

tokens, such as are very plenty about town!
At your leisure hours, knit children's woollen
socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast,
and make your own ginger-beer!"

And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost
to digest the hard little pellets of his already
uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final,
and what he declared to be his all-important
advice, as follows:—

"Put on a bright face for your customers,
and smile pleasantly as you hand them what
they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a
good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better
than a fresh one that you've scowled upon."

To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah
responded with a sigh so deep and heavy
that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite
away, like a withered leaf,—as he
was,—before an autumnal gale. Recovering
himself, however, he bent forward, and,
with a good deal of feeling in his ancient
visage, beckoned her nearer to him.

"When do you expect him home?"
whispered he.

"Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah,
turning pale.

"Ah? you don't love to talk about it," said
Uncle Venner. "Well, well! we'll say no more,
though there's word of it all over town. I
remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he
could run alone!"

During the remainder of the day, poor
Hepzibah acquitted herself even less
creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her
earlier efforts. She appeared to be walking
in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
reality assumed by her emotions made all
outward occurrences unsubstantial, like the
teasing phantasms of a half-conscious

-34-

between dawn and sunset, and of the
miserable irksomeness of having aught to
do, and of the better wisdom that it would
be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation,
and let life, and its toils and vexations,
trample over one's prostrate body as they
may! Hepzibah's final operation was with
the little devourer of Jim Crow and the
elephant, who now proposed to eat a
camel. In her bewilderment, she offered him
first a wooden dragoon, and next a handful
of marbles; neither of which being adapted
to his else omnivorous appetite, she hastily
held out her whole remaining stock of
natural history in gingerbread, and huddled
the small customer out of the shop. She then
muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking,
and put up the oaken bar across the door.

During the latter process, an omnibus came
to a stand-still under the branches of the
elm-tree. Hepzibah's heart was in her
mouth. Remote and dusky, and with no
sunshine on all the intervening space, was
that region of the Past whence her only
guest might be expected to arrive! Was she
to meet him. now?

Somebody, at all events, was passing from
the farthest interior of the omnibus towards
its entrance. A gentleman alighted; but it
was only to offer his hand to a young girl
whose slender figure, nowise needing such
assistance, now lightly descended the
steps, and made an airy little jump from the
final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her
cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of
which was seen reflected on his own face
as he reentered the vehicle. The girl then
turned towards the House of the Seven
Gables, to the door of which,
meanwhile,—not the shop-door, but the
antique portal,—the omnibus-man had
carried a light trunk and a bandbox. First
giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker,
he left his passenger and her luggage at the

-35-

back to her mother."

Phoebe, it must be understood, was that
one little offshoot of the Pyncheon race to
whom we have already referred, as a native
of a rural part of New England, where the
old fashions and feelings of relationship are
still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for
kinsfolk to visit one another without
invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious
warning. Yet, in consideration of Miss
Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched,
conveying information of Phoebe's
projected visit. This epistle, for three or four
days past, had been in the pocket of the
penny-postman, who, happening to have
no other business in Pyncheon Street, had
not yet made it convenient to call at the
House of the Seven Gables.

"No—she can stay only one night," said
Hepzibah, unbolting the door. "If Clifford
were to find her here, it might disturb him!"

Chapter 5: May and November

PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of
her arrival, in a chamber that looked down
on the garden of the old house. It fronted
towards the east, so that at a very
seasonable hour a glow of crimson light
came flooding through the window, and
bathed the dingy ceiling and paper-
hangings in its own hue. There were
curtains to Phoebe's bed; a dark, antique
canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff
which had been rich, and even magnificent,
in its time; but which now brooded over the
girl like a cloud, making a night in that one
corner, while elsewhere it was beginning to
be day. The morning light, however, soon
stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed,
betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the
new guest there,—with a bloom on her

-36-

Growing as they did, however, out of the old
earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and
sweet incense up to their Creator; nor could
it have been the less pure and acceptable
because Phoebe's young breath mingled
with it, as the fragrance floated past the
window. Hastening down the creaking and
carpetless staircase, she found her way
into the garden, gathered some of the most
perfect of the roses, and brought them to
her chamber.

Little Phoebe was one of those persons
who possess, as their exclusive patrimony,
the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind
of natural magic that enables these favored
ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of
things around them; and particularly to give
a look of comfort and habitableness to any
place which, for however brief a period,
may happen to be their home. A wild hut of
underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers
through the primitive forest, would acquire
the home aspect by one night's lodging of
such a woman, and would retain it long after
her quiet figure had disappeared into the
surrounding shade. No less a portion of
such homely witchcraft was requisite to
reclaim, as it were, Phoebe's waste,
cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
been untenanted so long—except by spiders,
and mice, and rats, and ghosts—that it was
all overgrown with the desolation which
watches to obliterate every trace of man's
happier hours. What was precisely
Phoebe's process we find it impossible to
say. She appeared to have no preliminary
design, but gave a touch here and another
there; brought some articles of furniture to
light and dragged others into the shadow;
looped up or let down a window-curtain;
and, in the course of half an hour, had fully
succeeded in throwing a kindly and
hospitable smile over the apartment. N o
longer ago than the night before, it had
resembled nothing so much as the old

-37-

been played upon, or opened, for
years,—there must have been a vast deal of
dead music in it, stifled for want of air.
Human finger was hardly known to have
touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet
accomplishment of melody in Europe.

Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down,
and, herself taking a chair near by, looked
as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as
if she expected to see right into its springs
and motive secrets.

"Cousin Phoebe," said she, at last, "I really
can't see my way clear to keep you with
me."

These words, however, had not the
inhospitable bluntness with which they may
strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a
talk before bedtime, had arrived at a certain
degree of mutual understanding. Hepzibah
knew enough to enable her to appreciate
the circumstances (resulting from the
second marriage of the girl's mother) which
made it desirable for Phoebe to establish
herself in another home. Nor did she
misinterpret Phoebe's character, and the
genial activity pervading it,—one of the most
valuable traits of the true New England
woman,—which had impelled her forth, as
might be said, to seek her fortune, but with
a self-respecting purpose to confer as
much benefit as she could anywise receive.
As one of her nearest kindred, she had
naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah, with
no idea of forcing herself on her cousin's
protection, but only for a visit of a week or
two, which might be indefinitely extended,
should it prove for the happiness of both.

To Hepzibah's blunt observation, therefore,
Phoebe replied as frankly, and more
cheerfully.

-38-

suddenly rising, as if to dismiss the subject,
"it is not for me to say who shall be a guest
or inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its
master is coming."

"Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked
Phoebe in surprise.

"Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin
angrily. "He will hardly cross the threshold
while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall
see the face of him I speak of."

She went in quest of the miniature already
described, and returned with it in her hand.
Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her
features narrowly, and with a certain
jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
would show herself affected by the picture.

"How do you like the face?" asked
Hepzibah.

"It is handsome!—it is very beautiful!" said
Phoebe admiringly. "It is as sweet a face as
a man's can be, or ought to be. It has
something of a child's expression,—and yet
not childish,—only one feels so very kindly
towards him! He ought never to suffer
anything. One would bear much for the sake
of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it,
Cousin Hepzibah?"

"Did you never hear," whispered her cousin,
bending towards her, "of Clifford
Pyncheon?"

"Never. I thought there were no Pyncheons
left, except yourself and our cousin Jaffrey,"
answered Phoebe. "And yet I seem to have
heard the name of Clifford Pyncheon.
Yes!—from my father or my mother. but has
he not been a long while dead?"

"Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said
Hepzibah with a sad, hollow laugh; "but, in

-39-

gold thread in the web.

Hepzibah brought out Some old silver
spoons with the family crest upon them, and
a china tea-set painted over with grotesque
figures of man, bird, and beast, in as
grotesque a landscape. These pictured
people were odd humorists, in a world of
their own,—a world of vivid brilliancy, so far
as color went, and still unfaded, although
the teapot and small cups were as ancient
as the custom itself of tea-drinking.

"Your great-great-great-great-
grandmother had these cups, when she
was married," said Hepzibah to
Phoebe."She was a Davenport, of a good
family. They were almost the first teacups
ever seen in the colony; and if one of them
were to be broken, my heart would break
with it. But it is Nonsense to speak so about
a brittle teacup, when I remember what my
heart has gone through without breaking."

The cups—not having been used, perhaps,
since Hepzibah's youth—had contracted no
small burden of dust, which Phoebe
washed away with so much care and
delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of
this invaluable china.

"What a nice little housewife you. are"
exclaimed the latter, smiling, and at the
Same time frowning so prodigiously that the
smile was sunshine under a thunder-cloud.
"Do you do other things as well? Are you as
good at your book as you are at washing
teacups?"

"Not quite, I am afraid," said Phoebe,
laughing at the form of Hepzibah's
question. "But I was schoolmistress for the
little children in our district last summer, and
might have been so still."

"Ah! 'tis all very well!" observed the maiden

-40-

"And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and
made better sales than anybody. These
things are not to be learnt; they depend
upon a knack that comes, I suppose,"
added she, smiling, "with one's mother's
blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little
saleswoman as I am a housewife!"

The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe,
and peeped from the passageway into the
shop, to note how she would manage her
undertaking. It was a case of some
intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white
short gown and a green petticoat, with a
string of gold beads about her neck, and
what looked like a nightcap on her head,
had brought a quantity of yarn to barter for
the commodities of the shop. She was
probably the very last person in town who
still kept the time-honored spinning-wheel
in constant revolution. It was worth while to
hear the croaking and hollow tones of the
old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe,
mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and
still better to contrast their figures,—so light
and bloomy,—so decrepit and dusky,—with
only the counter betwixt them, in one sense,
but more than threescore years, in another.
As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness
and craft pitted against native truth and
sagacity.

"Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe,
laughing, when the customer was gone.

"Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered
Hepzibah."I could not have gone through
with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be
a knack that belongs to you on the mother's
side."

It is a very genuine admiration, that with
which persons too shy or too awkward to
take a due part in the bustling world regard
the real actors in life's stirring scenes; so
genuine, in fact, that the former are usually

-41-

easier to it than rest,would hardly have
suited one's idea of a countess. Neither did
her face—with the brown ringlets on either
side, and the slightly piquant nose, and the
wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of
tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly
remembrances of the April sun and
breeze—precisely give us a right to call her
beautiful. But there was both lustre and
depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as
graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the
same way; as pleasant about the house as
a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor
through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as
a ray of firelight that dances on the wall
while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of
discussing her claim to rank among ladies,
it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as
the example of feminine grace and
availability combined, in a state of society,
if there were any such, where ladies did not
exist. There it should be woman's office to
move in the midst of practical affairs, and to
gild them all, the very homeliest,—were it
even the scouring of pots and kettles,—with
an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.

Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the
born and educated lady, on the other hand,
we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our
forlorn old maid, in her rustling and rusty
silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent,
her shadowy claims to princely territory,
and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly
thrummed on a harpsichord, and walked a
minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-
stitch on her sampler. It was a fair parallel
between new Plebeianism and old Gentility.

It really seemed as if the battered visage of
the House of the Seven Gables, black and
heavy-browed as it still certainly looked,
must have shown a kind of cheerfulness
glimmering through its dusky windows as

-42-

there ever was a Pyncheon whom she takes
after?"

"I don't believe there ever was," answered
the venerable man. "At any rate, it never
was my luck to see her like among them,
nor, for that matter, anywhere else. I've
seen a great deal of the world, not only in
people's kitchens and back-yards but at the
street-corners, and on the wharves, and in
other places where my business calls me;
and I'm free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I
never knew a human creature do her work
so much like one of God's angels as this
child Phoebe does!"

Uncle Venner's eulogium, if it appear rather
too high-strained for the person and
occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in
which it was both subtile and true. There
was a spiritual quality in Phoebe's activity.
The life of the long and busy day—spent in
occupations that might so easily have taken
a squalid and ugly aspect—had been made
pleasant, and even lovely, by the
spontaneous grace with which these
homely duties seemed to bloom out of her
character; so that labor, while she dealt with
it, had the easy and flexible charm of play.
Angels do not toil, but let their good works
grow out of them; and so did Phoebe.

The two relatives—the young maid and the
old one—found time before nightfall, in the
intervals of trade, to make rapid advances
towards affection and confidence. A
recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least
temporary affability, on being absolutely
cornered, and brought to the point of
personal intercourse; like the angel whom
Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless
you when once overcome.

The old gentlewoman took a dreary and
proud satisfaction in leading Phoebe from

-43-

withered and perished. This lovely Alice had
met with some great and mysterious
calamity, and had grown thin and white, and
gradually faded out of the world. But, even
now, she was supposed to haunt the House
of the Seven Gables, and, a great many
times,—especially when one of the
Pyncheons was to die,—she had been heard
playing sadly and beautifully on the
harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it
had sounded from her spiritual touch, had
been written down by an amateur of music;
it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody,
to this day, could bear to hear it played,
unless when a great sorrow had made them
know the still profounder sweetness of it.

"Was it the same harpsichord that you
showed me?" inquired Phoebe.

"The very same," said Hepzibah. "It was
Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. When I was
learning music, my father would never let
me open it. So, as I could only play on my
teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all my
music long ago."

Leaving these antique themes, the old lady
began to talk about the daguerreotypist,
whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning
and orderly young man, and in narrow
circumstances, she had permitted to take
up his residence in one of the seven gables.
But, on seeing more of Mr. Holgrave, she
hardly knew what to make of him. He had
the strangest companions imaginable; men
with long beards, and dressed in linen
blouses, and other such new-fangled and
ill-fitting garments; reformers, temperance
lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking
philanthropists; community-men, and
come-outers, as Hepzibah believed, who
acknowledged no law, and ate no solid
food, but lived on the scent of other
people's cookery, and turned up their noses
at the fare. As for the daguerreotypist, she

-44-

centre was a grass-plat, surrounding a
ruinous little structure, which showed just
enough of its original design to indicate that
it had once been a summer-house. A hop-
vine, springing from last year's root, was
beginning to clamber over it, but would be
long in covering the roof with its green
mantle. Three of the seven gables either
fronted or looked sideways, with a dark
solemnity of aspect, down into the garden.

The black, rich soil had fed itself with the
decay of a long period of time; such as
fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the
stalks and seed—vessels of vagrant and
lawless plants, more useful after their death
than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil
of these departed years would naturally
have sprung up again, in such rank weeds
(symbolic of the transmitted vices of
society) as are always prone to root
themselves about human dwellings.
Phoebe Saw, however, that their growth
must have been checked by a degree of
careful labor, bestowed daily and
systematically on the garden. The white
double rose-bush had evidently been
propped up anew against the house since
the commencement of the season; and a
pear-tree and three damson-trees, which,
except a row of currant-bushes, constituted
the only varieties of fruit, bore marks of the
recent amputation of several superfluous or
defective limbs. There were also a few
species of antique and hereditary flowers,
in no very flourishing condition, but
scrupulously weeded; as if some person,
either out of love or curiosity, had been
anxious to bring them to such perfection as
they were capable of attaining. The
remainder of the garden presented a well-
selected assortment of esculent
vegetables, in a praiseworthy state of
advancement. Summer squashes almost in
their golden blossom; cucumbers, now
evincing a tendency to spread away from

-45-

ofwich these bees were plying their golden
labor. There was one other object in the
garden which Nature might fairly claim as
her inalienable property, in spite of
whatever man could do to render it his own.
This was a fountain, set round with a rim of
old mossy stones, and paved, in its bed,
with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-
work of variously colored pebbles. The play
and slight agitation of the water, in its
upward gush, wrought magically with these
variegated pebbles, and made a continually
shifting apparition of quaint figures,
vanishing too suddenly to be definable.
Thence, swelling over the rim of moss-
grown stones, the water stole away under
the fence, through what we regret to call a
gutter, rather than a channel. Nor must we
forget to mention a hen-coop of very
reverend antiquity that stood in the farther
corner of the garden, not a great way from
the fountain. It now contained only
Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary
chicken. All of them were pure specimens
of a breed which had been transmitted
down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon
family, and were said, while in their prime,
to have attained almost the size of turkeys,
and, on the score of delicate flesh, to be fit
for a prince's table. In proof of the
authenticity of this legendary renown,
Hepzibah could have exhibited the shell of a
great egg, which an ostrich need hardly
have been ashamed of. Be that as it might,
the hens were now scarcely larger than
pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered
aspect, and a gouty kind of movement, and
a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all
the variations of their clucking and cackling.
It was evident that the race had
degenerated, like many a noble race
besides, in consequence of too strict a
watchfulness to keep it pure. These
feathered people had existed too long in
their distinct variety; a fact of which the
present representatives, judging by their

-46-

antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,—mustered vivacity enough to
flutter upward and alight on Phoebe's
shoulder.

"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!"
said a voice behind Phoebe.

Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight
of a young man, who had found access into
the garden by a door opening out of another
gable than that whence she had emerged.
He held a hoe in his hand, and, while
Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs,
had begun to busy himself with drawing up
fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.

"The chicken really treats you like an old
acquaintance," continued he in a quiet way,
while a smile made his face pleasanter than
Phoebe at first fancied it. "Those venerable
personages in the coop, too, seem very
affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their
good graces so soon! They have known me
much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes
without my bringing them food. Miss
Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the
fact with her other traditions, and set it down
that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"

"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I
have learned how to talk with hens and
chickens."

"Ah, but these hens," answered the young
man,—"these hens of aristocratic lineage
would scorn to understand the vulgar
language of a barn-yard fowl. I prefer to
think—and so would Miss Hepzibah—that they
recognize the family tone. For you are a
Pyncheon?"

"My name is Phoebe Pyncheon," said the
girl, with a manner of some reserve; for she
was aware that her new acquaintance could

-47-

art. Now, here is a likeness which I have
taken over and over again, and still with no
better result. Yet the original wears, to
common eyes, a very different expression.
It would gratify me to have your judgment on
this character."

He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a
morocco case. Phoebe merely glanced at
it, and gave it back.

"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern
eye has been following me about all day. It
is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in
the parlor. To be sure, you have found some
way of copying the portrait without its black
velvet cap and gray beard, and have given
him a modern coat and satin cravat, instead
of his cloak and band. I don't think him
improved by your alterations."

"You would have seen other differences had
you looked a little longer," said Holgrave,
laughing, yet apparently much struck. "I can
assure you that this is a modern face, and
one which you will very probably meet. Now,
the remarkable point is, that the original
wears, to the world's eye,—and, for aught I
know, to his most intimate friends,—an
exceedingly pleasant countenance,
indicative of benevolence, openness of
heart, sunny good-humor, and other
praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun,
as you see, tells quite another story, and will
not be coaxed out of it, after half a dozen
patient attempts on my part. Here we have
the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and,
withal, cold as ice. Look at that eye! Would
you like to be at its mercy? At that mouth!
Could it ever smile? And yet, if you could
only see the benign smile of the original! It is
so much the More unfortunate, as he is a
public character of some eminence, and the
likeness was intended to be engraved."

"Well, I don't wish to see it any more,"

-48-

seemed rather to be lack of ceremony than
any approach to offensive rudeness. There
was an odd kind of authority, too, in what he
now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which
he was admitted merely by Hepzibah's
courtesy.

"If agreeable to you," he observed, "it would
give me pleasure to turn over these flowers,
and those ancient and respectable fowls, to
your care. Coming fresh from country air
and occupations, you will soon feel the
need of some such out-of-door
employment. My own sphere does not so
much lie among flowers. You can trim and
tend them, therefore, as you please; and I
will ask only the least trifle of a blossom,
now and then, in exchange for all the good,
honest kitchen vegetables with which I
propose to enrich Miss Hepzibah's table.
So we will be fellow-laborers, somewhat
on the community system."

Silently, and rather surprised at her own
compliance, Phoebe accordingly betook
herself to weeding a flower-bed, but
busied herself still more with cogitations
respecting this young man, with whom she
so unexpectedly found herself on terms
approaching to familiarity. She did not
altogether like him. His character perplexed
the little country-girl, as it might a more
practised observer; for, while the tone of his
conversation had generally been playful, the
impression left on her mind was that of
gravity, and, except as his youth modified it,
almost sternness. She rebelled, as it were,
against a certain magnetic element in the
artist's nature, which he exercised towards
her, possibly without being conscious of it.

After a little while, the twilight, deepened by
the shadows of the fruit-trees and the
surrounding buildings, threw an obscurity
over the garden.

-49-

in the corner of the passage. My eyes are
weak; and I can seldom bear the lamplight
on them."

What an instrument is the human voice! How
wonderfully responsive to every emotion of
the human soul! In Hepzibah's tone, at that
moment, there was a certain rich depth and
moisture, as if the words, commonplace as
they were, had been steeped in the warmth
of her heart. Again, while lighting the lamp in
the kitchen, Phoebe fancied that her cousin
spoke to her.

"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl.
"These matches just glimmer, and go out."

But, instead of a response from Hepzibah,
she seemed to hear the murmur of an
unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct,
however, and less like articulate words than
an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather
than of the intellect. So vague was it, that its
impression or echo in Phoebe's mind was
that of unreality. She concluded that she
must have mistaken some other sound for
that of the human voice; or else that it was
altogether in her fancy.

She set the lighted lamp in the passage,
and again entered the parlor. Hepzibah's
form, though its sable outline mingled with
the dusk, was now less imperfectly visible.
In the remoter parts of the room, however,
its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light,
there was nearly the same obscurity as
before.

"Cousin," said Phoebe, "did you speak to
me just now?"

"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.

Fewer words than before, but with the
same mysterious music in them! Mellow,

-50-

with a hush through it, was going up along
with the footsteps; and, again, responsive
to her cousin's voice, Phoebe heard that
strange, vague murmur, which might be
likened to an indistinct shadow of human
utterance.

Chapter 7: The Guest

WHEN Phoebe awoke,—which she did with
the early twittering of the conjugal couple of
robins in the pear-tree,—she heard
movements below stairs, and, hastening
down, found Hepzibah already in the
kitchen. She stood by a window, holding a
book in close contiguity to her nose, as if
with the hope of gaining an olfactory
acquaintance with its contents, since her
imperfect vision made it not very easy to
read them. If any volume could have
manifested its essential wisdom in the
mode suggested, it would certainly have
been the one now in Hepzibah's hand; and
the kitchen, in such an event, would
forthwith have streamed with the fragrance
of venison, turkeys, capons, larded
partridges, puddings, cakes, and
Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate
mixture and concoction. It was a cookery
book, full of innumerable old fashions of
English dishes, and illustrated with
engravings, which represented the
arrangements of the table at such banquets
as it might have befitted a nobleman to give
in the great hall of his castle. And, amid
these rich and potent devices of the culinary
art (not one of which, probably, had been
tested, within the memory of any man's
grandfather), poor Hepzibah was seeking
for some nimble little titbit, which, with what
skill she had, and such materials as were at
hand, she might toss up for breakfast.

Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the
savory volume, and inquired of Phoebe
whether old Speckle, as she called one of

-51-

attendant on the rotation of the spit, or
ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire,
therefore, was quite an heroic test of
sentiment. It was touching, and positively
worthy of tears (if Phoebe, the only
spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed
than in shedding them), to see her rake out
a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and
proceed to broil the mackerel. Her usually
pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and
hurry. She watched the fish with as much
tender care and minuteness of attention as
if,—we know not how to express it
otherwise,—as if her own heart were on the
gridiron, and her immortal happiness were
involved in its being done precisely to a turn!

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter
prospects than a neatly arranged and well-
provisioned breakfast-table. We come to it
freshly, in the dewy youth of the day, and
when our spiritual and sensual elements are
in better accord than at a later period; so
that the material delights of the morning
meal are capable of being fully enjoyed,
without any very grievous reproaches,
whether gastric or conscientious, for
yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal
department of our nature. The thoughts, too,
that run around the ring of familiar guests
have a piquancy and mirthfulness, and
oftentimes a vivid truth, which more rarely
find their way into the elaborate intercourse
of dinner. Hepzibah's small and ancient
table, supported on its slender and graceful
legs, and covered with a cloth of the richest
damask, looked worthy to be the scene and
centre of one of the cheerfullest of parties.
The vapor of the broiled fish arose like
incense from the shrine of a barbarian idol,
while the fragrance of the Mocha might
have gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar,
or whatever power has scope over a
modern breakfast-table. Phoebe's Indian
cakes were the sweetest offering of all,—in

-52-

knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it
seemed an ecstasy of delight and
happiness. At such moments, Hepzibah
would fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe
in them, and kiss her cheek as tenderly as
ever her mother had; she appeared to do so
by an inevitable impulse, and as if her
bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of
which she must needs pour out a little, in
order to gain breathing-room. The next
moment, without any visible cause for the
change, her unwonted joy shrank back,
appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in
mourning; or it ran and hid itself, so to
speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where it
had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral
sorrow took the place of the imprisoned
joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,—a
sorrow as black as that was bright. She
often broke into a little, nervous, hysteric
laugh, more touching than any tears could
be; and forthwith, as if to try which was the
most touching, a gush of tears would follow;
or perhaps the laughter and tears came
both at once, and surrounded our poor
Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of
pale, dim rainbow. Towards Phoebe, as
we have said, she was affectionate,—far
tenderer than ever before, in their brief
acquaintance, except for that one kiss on
the preceding night,—yet with a Continually
recurring pettishness and irritability. She
would speak sharply to her; then, throwing
aside all the starched reserve of her
ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the next
instant renew the just-forgiven injury.

At last, when their mutual labor was all
finished, she took Phoebe's hand in her
own trembling one.

"Bear with me, my dear child," she cried;
"for truly my heart is full to the brim! Bear
with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I
speak so roughly. Think nothing of it,
dearest child! By and by, I shall be kind, and

-53-

the knob of the door; then loosened his
grasp without opening it. Hepzibah, her
hands convulsively clasped, stood gazing at
the entrance.

"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look
so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for her
cousin's emotion, and this mysteriously
reluctant step, made her feel as if a ghost
were coming into the room. "You really
frighten me! Is something awful going to
happen?"

"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah. "Be cheerful!
whatever may happen, be nothing but
cheerful!"

The final pause at the threshold proved so
long, that Hepzibah, unable to endure the
suspense, rushed forward, threw open the
door, and led in the stranger by the hand. At
the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly
personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-
gown of faded damask, and wearing his
gray or almost white hair of an unusual
length. It quite overshadowed his forehead,
except when he thrust it back, and stared
vaguely about the room. After a very brief
inspection of his face, it was easy to
conceive that his footstep must necessarily
be such an one as that which, slowly and
with as indefinite an aim as a child's first
journey across a floor, had just brought him
hitherward. Yet there were no tokens that
his physical strength might not have sufficed
for a free and determined gait. It was the
spirit of the man that could not walk. The
expression of his countenance—while,
notwithstanding it had the light of reason in
it—seemed to waver, and glimmer, and
nearly to die away, and feebly to recover
itself again. It was like a flame which we
see twinkling among half-extinguished
embers; we gaze at it more intently than if it
were a positive blaze, gushing vividly
upward,—more intently, but with a certain

-54-

He was evidently trying to grapple with the
present scene, and bring it home to his
mind with a more satisfactory distinctness.
He desired to be certain, at least, that he
was here, in the low-studded, cross-
beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in
some other spot, which had stereotyped
itself into his senses. But the effort was too
great to be sustained with more than a
fragmentary success. Continually, as we
may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and
consciousness took their departure, leaving
his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure—a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost—to
occupy his seat at table. Again, after a
blank moment, there would be a flickering
taper-gleam in his eyeballs. It betokened
that his spiritual part had returned, and was
doing its best to kindle the heart's
household fire, and light up intellectual
lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion,
where it was doomed to be a forlorn
inhabitant.

At one of these moments of less torpid, yet
still imperfect animation, Phoebe became
convinced of what she had at first rejected
as too extravagant and startling an idea.
She saw that the person before her must
have been the original of the beautiful
miniature in her cousin Hepzibah's
possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for
costume, she had at once identified the
damask dressing-gown, which enveloped
him, as the same in figure, material, and
fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture. This old, faded
garment, with all its pristine brilliancy
extinct, seemed, in some indescribable
way, to translate the wearer's untold
misfortune, and make it perceptible to the
beholder's eye. It was the better to be
discerned, by this exterior type, how worn
and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the

-55-

certain something which an obtuse auditor
might still have mistaken for asperity. It was
as if some transcendent musician should
draw a soul-thrilling sweetness out of a
cracked instrument, which makes its
physical imperfection heard in the midst of
ethereal harmony,—so deep was the
sensibility that found an organ in
Hepzibah's voice!

"There is nothing but love, here, Clifford,"
she added,—"nothing but love! You are at
home!"

The guest responded to her tone by a smile,
which did not half light up his face. Feeble
as it was, however, and gone in a moment,
it had a charm of wonderful beauty. It was
followed by a coarser expression; or one
that had the effect of coarseness on the fine
mould and outline of his countenance,
because there was nothing intellectual to
temper it. It was a look of appetite. He ate
food with what might almost be termed
voracity; and seemed to forget himself,
Hepzibah, the young girl, and everything
else around him, in the sensual enjoyment
which the bountifully spread table afforded.
In his natural system, though high-wrought
and delicately refined, a sensibility to the
delights of the palate was probably
inherent. It would have been kept in check,
however, and even converted into an
accomplishment, and one of the thousand
modes of intellectual culture, had his more
ethereal characteristics retained their vigor.
But as it existed now, the effect was painful
and made Phoebe droop her eyes.

In a little while the guest became sensible of
the fragrance of the yet untasted coffee. He
quaffed it eagerly. The subtle essence
acted on him like a charmed draught, and
caused the opaque substance of his animal
being to grow transparent, or, at least,
translucent; so that a spiritual gleam was

-56-

in its regard,—if thereby the wintry blasts of
our rude sphere might come tempered to
such a man.

Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it
seemed Clifford's nature to be a Sybarite. It
was perceptible, even there, in the dark old
parlor, in the inevitable polarity with which
his eyes were attracted towards the
quivering play of sunbeams through the
shadowy foliage. It was seen in his
appreciating notice of the vase of flowers,
the scent of which he inhaled with a zest
almost peculiar to a physical organization
so refined that spiritual ingredients are
moulded in with it. It was betrayed in the
unconscious smile with which he regarded
Phoebe, whose fresh and maidenly figure
was both sunshine and flowers,—their
essence, in a prettier and more agreeable
mode of manifestation. Not less evident
was this love and necessity for the
Beautiful, in the instinctive caution with
which, even so soon, his eyes turned away
from his hostess, and wandered to any
quarter rather than come back. It was
Hepzibah's misfortune,—not Clifford's fault.
How could he,—so yellow as she was, so
wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd
uncouthness of a turban on her head, and
that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,—how could he love to gaze at her?
But, did he owe her no affection for so much
as she had silently given? He owed her
nothing. A nature like Clifford's can contract
no debts of that kind. It is—we say it without
censure, nor in diminution of the claim
which it indefeasibly possesses on beings
of another mould—it is always selfish in its
essence; and we must give it leave to be
so, and heap up our heroic and
disinterested love upon it so much the more,
without a recompense. Poor Hepzibah
knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the
instinct of it. So long estranged from what
was lovely as Clifford had been, she

-57-

choosing a small crimson one from among
the flowers in the vase. "There will be but
five or six on the bush this season. This is
the most perfect of them all; not a speck of
blight or mildew in it. And how sweet it
is!—sweet like no other rose! One can never
forget that scent!"

"Ah!—let me see!—let me hold it!" cried the
guest, eagerly seizing the flower, which, by
the spell peculiar to remembered odors,
brought innumerable associations along
with the fragrance that it exhaled. "Thank
you! This has done me good. I remember
how I used to prize this flower,—long ago, I
suppose, very long ago!—or was it only
yesterday? It makes me feel young again!
Am I young? Either this remembrance is
singularly distinct, or this consciousness
strangely dim! But how kind of the fair young
girl! Thank you! Thank you!"

The favorable excitement derived from this
little crimson rose afforded Clifford the
brightest moment which he enjoyed at the
breakfast-table. It might have lasted longer,
but that his eyes happened, soon
afterwards, to rest on the face of the old
Puritan, who, out of his dingy frame and
lustreless canvas, was looking down on the
scene like a ghost, and a most ill-tempered
and ungenial one. The guest made an
impatient gesture of the hand, and
addressed Hepzibah with what might easily
be recognized as the licensed irritability of a
petted member of the family.

"Hepzibah!—Hepzibah!" cried he with no little
force and distinctness, "why do you keep
that odious picture on the wall? Yes,
yes!—that is precisely your taste! I have told
you, a thousand times, that it was the evil
genius of the house!—my evil genius
particularly! Take it down, at once!"

"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you

-58-

with whatever grace had flickered over that
visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had
gleamed in those filmy eyes.

Before he had quite sunken away,
however, the sharp and peevish tinkle of the
shop-bell made itself audible. Striking most
disagreeably on Clifford's auditory organs
and the characteristic sensibility of his
nerves, it caused him to start upright out of
his chair.

"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible
disturbance have we now in the house?"
cried he, wreaking his resentful
impatience—as a matter of course, and a
custom of old—on the one person in the world
that loved him." I have never heard such a
hateful clamor! Why do you permit it? In the
name of all dissonance, what can it be?"

It was very remarkable into what prominent
relief—even as if a dim picture should leap
suddenly from its canvas—Clifford's
character was thrown by this apparently
trifling annoyance. The secret was, that an
individual of his temper can always be
pricked more acutely through his sense of
the beautiful and harmonious than through
his heart. It is even possible—for similar
cases have often happened—that if Clifford,
in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means
of cultivating his taste to its utmost
perfectibility, that subtile attribute might,
before this period, have completely eaten
out or filed away his affections. Shall we
venture to pronounce, therefore, that his
long and black calamity may not have had a
redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?

"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound
from your ears," said Hepzibah, patiently,
but reddening with a painful suffusion of
shame. "It is very disagreeable even to me.
But, do you know, Clifford, I have
something to tell you? This ugly noise,—pray

-59-

smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of
which was a puzzle to her.

"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.

Finally, his chair being deep and softly
cushioned, Clifford fell asleep. Hearing the
more regular rise and fall of his breath
(which, however, even then, instead of
being strong and full, had a feeble kind of
tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor
in his character),—hearing these tokens of
settled slumber, Hepzibah seized the
opportunity to peruse his face more
attentively than she had yet dared to do. Her
heart melted away in tears; her profoundest
spirit sent forth a moaning voice, low,
gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In this depth of
grief and pity she felt that there was no
irreverence in gazing at his altered, aged,
faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote
her for gazing curiously at him, now that he
was so changed; and, turning hastily away,
Hepzibah let down the curtain over the
sunny window, and left Clifford to slumber
there.

Chapter 8: The Pyncheon of To-day

PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld
there the already familiar face of the little
devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds
aright—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel,
the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the
two preceding days, in 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

-60-

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 considerately 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 fleshly 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 labor 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 gray 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 Hepzibah and her inmates) by
the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl,
instead of the gaunt presence of the old

-61-

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 a substance.
The truth was,—and it is Phoebe's only
excuse,—that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely
unpleasant to the feminine beholder, with
the width of a 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-browned, grisly-
bearded, white-neck-clothed, and
unctuously-benevolent Judge! Then, why
not by him?

On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled
by the change in Judge Pyncheon'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 thunder-storm; not that it had the
passionate intensity of the latter aspect, but
was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-
long brooding cloud.

"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought
the country-girl to herself." He looks as if

-62-

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 chary 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 sombre traditions,—the progenitor of
the whole race of New England Pyncheons,
the founder of the House of the Seven
Gables, and who had died so strangely in
it,—had now stept into the shop. In these days
of off-hand 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 a ready-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 to take up a gold-
headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon 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 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

-63-

the resemblance of mien and feature would
afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the
clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it
were, a 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
Pyncheon of to-day, 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 so
doing,—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 close-fisted
as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of
kindliness, a rough heartiness of word and

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two centuries. We shall only add, therefore,
that the Puritan—so, at least, says chimney-
corner tradition, which often preserves
traits of character with marvellous
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 incrustations 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 Maule, the executed wizard, against
Colonel Pyncheon 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
Pyncheon 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 in
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

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"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 Hepzibah'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 startle me!—Oh, no
indeed!"

"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so
ingenuous 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" rejoined the
Judge, with a commiserating look," that you
have never heard of Clifford
Pyncheon?—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 a rule which Christians should
always follow, in 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 is Clifford in the parlor? I
will just step in and see."

"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin
Hepzibah," said Phoebe; hardly knowing,

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habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably
too fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off
on the innocent score of near-sightedness;
and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon 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 Hepzibah's secret, and
confess that the native timorousness 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 hardihood lay behind Hepzibah'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 Hepzibah
on the spot, as if she were a figure of yellow
wax.

"Hepzibah, 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

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offices,—my earnest propositions for your
welfare! They are such, in all respects, as it
behooves your nearest kinsman 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 Hepzibah,
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
suspected as much! Take care, Hepzibah,
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!"

Hepzibah 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
Pyncheon'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-defence than belongs
to a frightened infant.

"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go
down on your knees to him! Kiss his feet!
Entreat 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 Hepzibah 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

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to do you."

With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of
paternal benevolence in his parting nod to
Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went
smiling along the street. As is 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
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at
least, was the rumor about town) an extra
passage of the water-carts was found
essential, in order to lay the dust
occasioned by so much extra sunshine!

No sooner had he disappeared than
Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head
fall on the young girl's shoulder.

"O 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 Hepzibah. "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."

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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
Hepzibah, in 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 Hepzibah 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 Tatler, and an odd one of
Dryden's Miscellanies, all with tarnished

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house for the means of more exhilarating
pastime. At one time, her eyes chanced to
rest on Alice Pyncheon'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 Hepzibah! 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 Hepzibah 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
gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it
is no great marvel, although the mournfullest
of pities, that the instinctive lover of the
Beautiful was fain 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 doubtless
press Hepzibah'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 Hepzibah! She took counsel
with herself what might be done, and
thought of putting ribbons on her turban; but,
by the instant rush of several guardian
angels, was withheld from an experiment
that could hardly have proved less than fatal

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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 Pyncheon House was the very
locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But
now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a
minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks,
diffusing its fragrance through 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 Hepzibah and
Clifford, sombre 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 gayety of the robins in the pear-
tree, and now to such a depth as she could
with Hepzibah'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
Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny
lightsomeness of Phoebe's figure, were
perhaps in some fit proportion with the
moral weight and substance, respectively,
of the woman and the girl.

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temperament, that Phoebe oftener chose a
strain of pathos than of gayety. 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
thence acquired, that one's heart felt all the
lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in
the sacred presence of dark misfortune,
would have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its
undertone through Hepzibah's 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 tints 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, and 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 a 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. Anon, as age came stealing, like a sad
twilight, back over his figure, you would
have felt tempted to hold an argument with

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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
handicraftsman 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 birthday 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 quaffed the cup of passionate
love, and knew that it was now too late. He
knew it, with the instinctive delicacy that had

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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 rose-bud had come
to his nostrils, and, as odors 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
girl's 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 piquant
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 a 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

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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 noonday. These
hours of drowsihead were the season of the
old gentlewoman'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
shopwoman by the multiplicity of their calls
during her administration of affairs. Dinner
over, Hepzibah 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 enjoining 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.

Chapter 10: The Pyncheon 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 counselled him to sit in his
morning chair till eventide. 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 luxuriantly
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.

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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
feeling 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,
intently 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 a
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

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