THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

I.

The Old Pyncheon Family

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty

wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various

points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The

street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an

elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to

every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my

occasional visits to the town 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 there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and

walls,—we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not

very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection

with the long past—a reference to forgotten events and personages, and

to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete—which, if

adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much

of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life.

Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded

truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and

must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together

with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term

expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth,

which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the

first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of

ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of

Maule’s Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,

before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft

and pleasant water—a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the

Puritan settlement was made—had early induced Matthew Maule to build a

hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote

from what was then the centre of the village. In the growth of the

town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by

this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a

prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the

proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the

strength of a grant from the legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the

claimant, as we gather from whatever traits 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.

Clergymen, judges, statesmen,—the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of

their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to

applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably

deceived. If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve

less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with

which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former

judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,

brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not

strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have

trodden the martyr’s path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in

the throng of his fellow sufferers. But, in after days, when the frenzy

of that hideous epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly

Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from

witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an

invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the

condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well known that the victim had

recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutor’s

conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for

his spoil. At the moment of execution—with the halter about his neck,

and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene

Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of

which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very

words. “God,” said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly

look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,—“God will give him

blood to drink!”

After the reputed wizard’s death, his humble homestead had fallen an

easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon’s grasp. When it was understood,

however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansion—spacious,

ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for 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 foundations of his mansion, on the square of

earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away

the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an

ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,

the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness

of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the

depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the

bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule’s Well, as it continued

to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any

old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of

intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new

edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe

the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was the

best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it

expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast

aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was

it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact

character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest

penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse

of his father’s deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the

architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so

faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds

together.

Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer’s

recollection,—for it has been an object of curiosity with him from

boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of

a 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 from the line of the

street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was

ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a

Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed

of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the

walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply

towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of

edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The

many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the

sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,

projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,

threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved

globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral

rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular

portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up

that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage

of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all

so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and

broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,

on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression

of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to

make among men’s daily interests.

The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door,

was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an

open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched

doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the

clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of

aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too, thronged the

plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number. Just

within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some of

the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into

the 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; on entering which, an hour before,

he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.

“Do not you see, fellow,” said the high-sheriff of the county, taking

the servant aside, “that this is no less a man than the

lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he

received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and

consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his

noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to

neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be

said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself.

Call your master instantly.”

“Nay, please your worship,” answered the man, in much perplexity, but

with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe

character of Colonel Pyncheon’s domestic rule; “my master’s orders were

exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no

discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list

open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor’s own voice should

bid me do it!”

“Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!” cried the lieutenant-governor, who

had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in

station to play a little with his dignity. “I will take the matter into

my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to greet his

friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a sip too

much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask it were

best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much behindhand,

I will give him a remembrancer myself!”

Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might

of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he

advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new

panels 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.

They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the

lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the room

in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld nothing

extraordinary: a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat

darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the

wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat

the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in

his hand. Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the

table before him. He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front of

which stood the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his dark

and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness that

had impelled them into his private retirement.

A little boy—the Colonel’s grandchild, and the only human being that

ever dared to be familiar with him—now made his way among the guests,

and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to

shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,

when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there

was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon’s

stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was

saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The iron-hearted

Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man

was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a tradition, only worth

alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious awe to a scene perhaps

gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke loudly among the guests,

the tones of which were like those of old Matthew Maule, the executed

wizard,—“God hath given him blood to drink!”

Thus early had that one guest,—the only guest who is certain, at one

time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,—thus early

had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven

Gables!

Colonel 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 lieutenant-governor 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

in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner’s jury sat upon

the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable verdict of

“Sudden Death!”

It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious

suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any

particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and eminent

character of the deceased must have insured the strictest scrutiny into

every ambiguous circumstance. As none such is on record, it is safe to

assume that none existed. Tradition,—which sometimes brings down truth

that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time,

such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in

newspapers,—tradition is responsible for all contrary averments. In

Colonel Pyncheon’s funeral sermon, which was printed, and is still

extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many felicities of

his distinguished parishioner’s earthly career, the happy

seasonableness of his death. His duties all performed,—the highest

prosperity attained,—his race and future generations fixed on a stable

basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to

come,—what other upward step remained for this good man to take, save

the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious

clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the

least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world

with the clutch of violence upon his throat.

The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed

destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the

inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be anticipated

that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their

prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only had his son

and heir come into 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 course of

time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,

and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if they

ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea of any

man’s asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed

with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and

forgotten—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the

wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable claim,

therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from

generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,

which all along characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest

member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and

might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it. In

the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal

grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any

truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase

the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of

a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization

of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the

public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel’s

ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an

unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had put down woods,

lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the

villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value

of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately

forming a princedom for themselves.

In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one

descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,

and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original

founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as

distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted

with 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

to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its

depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there,—the old

Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique

babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or

saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that

mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its

revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is

difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew

Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and

that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they

could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not

as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and

happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the

crisis of life’s bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed,

long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and

the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold

was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a

part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle

in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between

jest and earnest, “He has Maule’s blood to drink!” The sudden death of

a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar

to what have been related of the Colonel’s exit, was held as giving

additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was

considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel

Pyncheon’s picture—in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his

will—remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those

stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and

so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of

the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring

up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of

superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the

ghost of a dead progenitor—perhaps as a portion of his own

punishment—is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.

The 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 have been under a

monarchy,—the high respectability and political influence of the

criminal’s connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to

perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years

before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors

(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)

that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be

summoned forth from his living tomb.

It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now

almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of great

wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which constituted what

remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of an eccentric and

melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records and

hearkening to old traditions, he had brought himself, it is averred, to

the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the wizard, had been foully wronged

out of his homestead, if not out of his life. Such being the case, and

he, the old bachelor, in possession of the ill-gotten spoil,—with the

black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by

conscientious nostrils,—the question occurred, whether it were not

imperative upon him, even at this late hour, to make restitution to

Maule’s posterity. To a man living so much in the past, and so little

in the present, as the secluded and antiquarian old bachelor, a century

and a half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of

substituting right for wrong. It was the belief of those who knew him

best, that he would positively have taken the very singular step of

giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of

Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the

old gentleman’s project awakened among his 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. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably an

honor to his race. He had built himself a country-seat within a few

miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as

could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and

virtue—as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election—befitting

the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman.

There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of

the Judge’s prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had

not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of

the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a

single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the

thirty years’ prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,

who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven

Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.

She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her

choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had

repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old

mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon was

a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the

Judge’s cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or

property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had

recently taken another husband.

As for Matthew Maule’s posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.

For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the

Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had

suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,

honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against

individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or

if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any

hostile recollection of the wizard’s fate and their lost patrimony, it

was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been

singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables

was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully

their own. There is something so massive, stable, and almost

irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank

and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a

right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few

poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in

their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient

prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in

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.

So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out

from other men—not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an

effect that was felt rather than spoken of—by an hereditary character

of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,

grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity

or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness

and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step. It was this

indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from human

aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly operated to

prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only

inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with

which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,

continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches. The mantle, or

rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his

children. They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes; the

family eye was said to possess strange power. Among other

good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned

them,—that of exercising an influence over people’s dreams. The

Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves

in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than

bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy

commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to

reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting

them as altogether fabulous.

A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled mansion in

its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close.

The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to

be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice

was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small,

built entirely of wood, and typical of the most 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 four-score years of age, or perhaps

nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing

its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven

gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It

gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.

The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable

was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous

wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy

yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous

fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to

say, two or three feet long. Behind the house there appeared to be a

garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now

infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and

outbuildings that stood on another street. It would be an omission,

trifling, indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss

that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and

on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the reader’s eye

to a crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in

the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of

the gables. They were called Alice’s Posies. The tradition was, that a

certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the

dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of

soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her

grave. However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and

sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying,

gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the

ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty,

and grew melancholy in the effort.

There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we

greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which

we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable

edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second

story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, divided

horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment,

such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date. This

same shop-door had been a subject of no slight mortification to the

present occupant of the august 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-book.

From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his

doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance.

And now—in a very humble way, as will be seen—we proceed to open our

narrative.

II.

The Little Shop-Window

It still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon—we

will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor lady had so much

as closed her eyes during the brief night of midsummer—but, at all

events, arose from her solitary pillow, and began what it would be

mockery to term the adornment of her person. Far from us be the

indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a maiden lady’s toilet!

Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her

chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some of the heavy sighs

that labored from her bosom, with little restraint as to their

lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they could be audible

to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself. The Old Maid was

alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certain respectable and

orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line, who, for about

three months back, had been a lodger in a remote gable,—quite a house

by itself, indeed,—with locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the

intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss Hepzibah’s

gusty sighs. Inaudible the creaking joints of her stiffened knees, as

she knelt down by the bedside. And inaudible, too, by mortal ear, but

heard with all-comprehending love and pity in the farthest heaven, that

almost agony of prayer—now whispered, now a groan, now a struggling

silence—wherewith she besought the Divine assistance through the day!

Evidently, this is to be a day of more than 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 less delicate a pencil. It was

once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young

man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of

which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,

tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much

capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the possessor

of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except that he

would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it. Can it

have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a

lover—poor thing, how could she?—nor ever knew, by her own experience,

what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith and trust, her

fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the original of

that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart to feed

upon.

She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before

the toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more footsteps

to and fro; and here, at last,—with another pitiful sigh, like a gust

of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of which has

accidentally been set, ajar—here comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon! Forth

she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall figure, clad in

black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the

stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.

The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending

nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward,

caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on

the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House

of the Seven Gables, which—many such sunrises as it had

witnessed—looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance

served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement of the

room which 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 of old Colonel

Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features of a

Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and a

grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other

uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more

successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater

prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on

entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;

regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow,

which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been

interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. But it was

no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,

of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be

susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her

near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision

as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.

We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor

Hepzibah’s brow. Her scowl,—as the world, or such part of it as

sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly

persisted in calling it,—her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill

office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor

does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim

looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its

ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as

unjustly as the world did. “How miserably cross I look!” she must often

have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a

sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was naturally

tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations; all of

which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so

perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had 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 evidently undergone rigid

discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!

had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little

old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye,

privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the

counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and

half ditto,—one containing flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps,

Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pine-wood, full of soap

in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were tallow candles,

ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white beans and

split peas, and a few other commodities of low price, and such as are

constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise.

It might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of

the old shop-keeper Pyncheon’s shabbily provided shelves, save that

some of the articles were of a description and outward form which could

hardly have been known in his day. For instance, there was a glass

pickle-jar, filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed,

splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress, but

bits of delectable candy, neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow,

moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.

A party of leaden dragoons were galloping along one of the shelves, in

equipments and uniform of modern cut; and there were some sugar

figures, with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but

less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a

hundred years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern,

was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been

thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether

fires of Tophet.

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 personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not

vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on

perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to

tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her

object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but

with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the

dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an

elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There, again,

she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways,

and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most difficult

obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and

forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position! As her rigid

and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in quest of the

absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more inclined to

shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must needs turn

aside and laugh at her. For here,—and if we fail to impress it suitably

upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of the theme, here is

one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary

life. It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A

lady—who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of

aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady’s

hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread,—this born

lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from

her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels

for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own

food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too

irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be

transformed into the plebeian woman.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social

life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted

with as continual 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 Hepzibah’s heart, and was now

torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the

neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could

tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day,

the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer

taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child could

teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.

So—with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last coming

into sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept

aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone

against the cavern door of her hermitage—the poor thing bethought

herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till.

She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not

yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble

preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to

be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable

singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might

point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in

houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may

be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an

image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.

It was overpoweringly ridiculous,—we must honestly confess it,—the

deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the

public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she

conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the

elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank

arm, she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a jew’s-harp, or whatever the

small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished

back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse

of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to

minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied

divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential

and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But 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 had been thrown down, and a

flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap—she fled

into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral elbow-chair,

and wept.

Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who

endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,

in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the

mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos

which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example,

can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history

of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most

prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce—not a young and lovely

woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by

affliction—but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted

silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head! Her

visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance only by the

contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl. And, finally,

her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness,

she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop

in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic

fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something

mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is

made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a

comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the

insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron

countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of

discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty

and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.

III.

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.

The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming freshly,

as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some

of its cheery influences into the shop along with him. It was a slender

young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with rather a

grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a springy

alacrity and vigor. These qualities were not only perceptible,

physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost

immediately in his character. A brown beard, not too silken in its

texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he

wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, high-featured countenance

looked all the better for these natural ornaments. As for his dress, it

was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary material,

thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of the finest

braid. Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment. He was

chiefly marked as a gentleman—if such, indeed, he made any claim to

be—by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean linen.

He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having

heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.

“So, my dear Miss Pyncheon,” said the daguerreotypist,—for it was that

sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,—“I am glad to see that

you have not shrunk from your good purpose. I merely look in to offer

my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in your

preparations.”

People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the

world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only

the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest

expression of what they perceive to be 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 your circle of gentility, while the rest of the world was

fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or another.

Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and natural

effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great or

small—to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,—all the

success that anybody meets with!”

“It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like

these,” rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly

offended dignity. “You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I

suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your

fortune. But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter in

what narrowness of means, always a lady.”

“But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one,” said

Holgrave, slightly smiling; “so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect

me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I

deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These

names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the

world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those

entitled to bear them. In the present—and still more in the future

condition of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!”

“These are new notions,” said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head. “I

shall never understand them; neither do I wish it.”

“We will cease to speak of them, then,” replied the artist, with a

friendlier smile than his last one, “and I will leave you to feel

whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady. Do you really

think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more

heroic thing, since this 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-window. She was doubly

tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and

unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because

the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window

was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it

might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her

shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or

substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So

she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was

spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the

juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought

all the seeming mischief.

Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two

laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After some

slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the

shop-window, and directed the other’s attention to it.

“See here!” cried he; “what do you think of this? Trade seems to be

looking up in Pyncheon Street!”

“Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!” exclaimed the other. “In the

old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have

thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!”

“Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?” said his friend. “I don’t call

it a very good stand. There’s another shop just round the corner.”

“Make it go!” cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if

the very idea were impossible to be conceived. “Not a bit of it! Why,

her face—I’ve seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year—her face

is 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 lady—the recluse of half a lifetime, utterly

unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,—how could she ever

dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed New

England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success

presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild

hallucination.

Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,

unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the

great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and so

magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,

with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their

vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had

been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each

establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista

of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a

multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,

and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House of the

Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting

story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the

counter, scowling at the world as it went by! This mighty contrast

thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which

she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence. Success? Preposterous!

She would never think of it again! The house might just as well be

buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the sunshine on

them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a hand so much

as try the door!

But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if

it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman’s heart seemed to be 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.

“No matter for the money,” said she, giving him a little push towards

the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight

of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to

take the child’s pocket-money in exchange for a bit of stale

gingerbread. “No matter for the cent. You are welcome to Jim Crow.”

The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,

wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the

man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached

the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow’s head was in

his mouth. As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was at

the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two

about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small

boys. She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim

Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and

again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,

disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,

had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,

as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.

“What is it now, child?” asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; “did

you come back to shut the door?”

“No,” answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been

put up; “I want that other Jim Crow.”

“Well, here it is for you,” said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but

recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any

other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she

partly drew back her extended hand, “Where is the 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 healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now

in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her

hand to help herself. The little circlet of the schoolboy’s copper

coin—dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which it

had been doing here and there about the world—had proved a talisman,

fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn next her

heart. It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same kind of

efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was indebted to

its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the more, as it

inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which, still the

better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra spoonful in

her infusion of black tea.

Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however, without

many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor. As a

general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than

just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a

reasonably full exertion of their powers. In the case of our old

gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the

despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return. It

was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the

sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,

it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the

envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial

azure.

Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some

cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to

themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of

very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her 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 breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;

and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave

her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this

very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular

rebuke.

“A cent-shop, and no yeast!” quoth she; “That will never do! Who ever

heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine

will to-day. You had better shut up shop at once.”

“Well,” said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, “perhaps I had!”

Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like

sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not

rude, tone with which people addressed her. They evidently considered

themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors. Now,

Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there

would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person,

which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at

least, a tacit recognition of it. On the other hand, nothing tortured

her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently

expressed. To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her

responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,

Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the

suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any

real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked

wish to stare at her. The vulgar creature was determined to see for

herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after

wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from

the world, would cut behind a counter. In this particular case, however

mechanical and 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?”

Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.

“May God forgive me!” said she.

Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and outward

history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to

fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point

of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her

temporal welfare.

IV.

A Day Behind the Counter

Towards noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and

of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite

side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the

Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the

perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial

interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables.

He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as

the house. No better model need be sought, nor could have been found,

of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable

magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even

governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and

essential to the man. Without appearing to differ, in any tangible way,

from other people’s clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity

about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it

could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material. His

gold-headed cane, too,—a serviceable staff, of dark polished wood,—had

similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself, would have

been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate representative of its

master. This 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 mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued

his way.

“There he is!” said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter

emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it

back into her heart. “What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it

please him? Ah! he is looking back!”

The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,

still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window. In fact, he wheeled

wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the

shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah’s

first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the

window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread. What

a grand appetite had this small urchin!—Two Jim Crows immediately after

breakfast!—and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before dinner. By

the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly gentleman had

resumed his way, and turned the street corner.

“Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey,” muttered the maiden lady, as she

drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up and

down the street,—“Take it as you like! You have seen my little

shop-window. Well!—what have you to say?—is not the Pyncheon House my

own, while I’m alive?”

After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she

at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at it

with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds

with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the

room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old

Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the 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 himself the very man

to build up a new house! Perhaps, too, to draw down a new curse!”

Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old

time. She had dwelt too much alone,—too long in the Pyncheon

House,—until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its

timbers. She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.

By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted

with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but

yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect. Malbone’s

miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to

Hepzibah’s air-drawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful

remembrance wrought together. Soft, mildly, and cheerfully

contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which

the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs!

Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The

miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably

thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and

lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that

made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.

“Yes,” thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more

tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, “they

persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!”

But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote

distance,—so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of

her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a

humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and 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 pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such

success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest

part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged

deficiency. But now, in his extreme old age,—whether it were that his

long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his

decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring

himself,—the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and

really enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at times, a vein

of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wall-flower of his

mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have

been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life. Hepzibah

had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had

formerly been respectable. It was a still better reason for awarding

him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the

most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,

except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that

overshadowed it.

This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old

blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him

from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for his trousers,

they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down

strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure

which his other garment entirely lacked. His hat had relation to no

other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.

Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,

but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of

different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.

“So, you have really begun trade,” said he,—“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 much the lower

to them. I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old

tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do

believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!”

“Yes,” said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her

tone; “my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!”

“And so he has” replied Uncle Venner. “And that’s rather remarkable in

a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the

name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting

close to them. But now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to

ask, why don’t Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and

tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It’s for your

credit to be doing something, but it’s not for the Judge’s credit to

let you!”

“We won’t talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner,” said Hepzibah

coldly. “I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for

myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon’s fault. Neither will he deserve the

blame,” added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner’s privileges of

age and humble familiarity, “if I should, by and by, find it convenient

to retire with you to your farm.”

“And it’s no bad place, either, that farm of mine!” cried the old man

cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the

prospect. “No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for

them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.

I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for

it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be

nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.

Summer or winter, there’s a great 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 centuries,—this eminent

gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the Seven

Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But,

for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to his request. It

was more probable, therefore, that the descendants of a Pyncheon who

had emigrated to Virginia, in some past generation, and became a great

planter there,—hearing of Hepzibah’s destitution, and impelled by the

splendid generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture

must have enriched the New England blood,—would send her a remittance

of a thousand dollars, with a hint of repeating the favor annually.

Or,—and, surely, anything so undeniably just could not be beyond the

limits of reasonable anticipation,—the great claim to the heritage of

Waldo County might finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so

that, instead of keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace,

and look down from its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and

town, as her own share of the ancestral territory.

These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,

aided by these, Uncle Venner’s casual attempt at encouragement kindled

a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her

brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But

either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,—as how should he?—or

else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might a more

courageous man’s. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic, Uncle Venner

was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in her

shop-keeping capacity.

“Give no credit!”—these were some of his golden maxims,—“Never take

paper-money. Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the

four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper

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 slumber.

She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the

shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague

eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and

thrusting aside—perversely, as most of them supposed—the identical

thing they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit

thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in

any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region

and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it

may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like

death, without death’s quiet privilege,—its freedom from mortal care.

Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty

details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the

animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in

the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her

small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors: now

stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to

the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and

needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public

detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her

utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day’s

labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer

almost destitute of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole

proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable

ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.

At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had

reached its end. Never before had she had such a sense of the

intolerable length of time that creeps 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?