prompt:
Chapter: CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide.  But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers.  The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.

Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford.  Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement.  Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's.  Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences.  But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand.  When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
         but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look.  If a tear--a
         maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
         page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
         grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume.  And wisely
         too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
         pastime of mock sorrows?

         With poetry it was rather better.  He delighted in the swell and
         subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme.  Nor was
         Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
         where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
         ethereal.  It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
         awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
         Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
         through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
         lambent flame from what she read.  One glow of this kind, however, was
         often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
         the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
         and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
         eyesight.

         It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
         should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
         accompanying description and remarks.  The life of the garden offered
         topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best.  He never
         failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday.  His
         feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
         as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
         observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
         garden flower were the sister of the household maiden.  Not merely was
         there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
         form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
         enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
         individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
         they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence.  This affection and
         sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait.  Men, if
         endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
         in their contact with coarser things than flowers.  Clifford, too, had
         long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
         the chill torpor of his life.

         It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
         that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
         them.  She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
         acquaintance with the place.  And often,--almost continually,
         indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
         by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
         there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
         nearer home than this.  Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
         into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
         a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
         productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
         wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
         England honey.  When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
         heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
         sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
         in the whole height from earth to heaven.  After all, there need be no
         question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
         God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford.  They brought the
         rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.

         When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
         particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom.  The
         daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
         seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
         horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
         the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
         By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
         ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
         experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
         full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
         spiral profusion of red blossoms.  And, ever since the unfolding of the
         first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither.  At
         times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
         one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
         plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles.  It was with
         indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
         Clifford watched the humming-birds.   He used to thrust his head softly
         out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
         Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
         so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy.  He had
         not merely grown young;--he was a child again.

         Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
         miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
         the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect.  She
         said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
         came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
         been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
         beautiful things.  And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
         thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
         beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
         grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
         of Clifford's return.

         Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
         with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
         some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation.  Indeed, all the
         enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears.  Coming so late as
         it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
         sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight.  The more
         Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
         difference to be recognized.  With a mysterious and terrible Past,
         which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
         only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
         at it, is nothing.  He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
         lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
         was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing.  Clifford
         saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
         an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
         inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
         the world:  breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
         withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
         banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
         been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
         solitude, and torment.  All his life long, he had been learning how to
         be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
         thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
         airy happiness.  Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
         eyes.  "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
         your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
         prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!"  Evidently, he desired
         this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
         quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
         weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
         real likewise.  Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
         attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
         imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
         sustenance was exhausted.

         The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
         hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
         trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life.  It
         was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
         out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
         Adam was expelled.

         One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
         in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
         whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
         Pyncheon family.  In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
         him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
         roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
         hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
         peaks of a wooden fence on the other.  They spent much of their
         abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
         kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
         water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
         esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
         their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
         wine-bibbers round a probationary cask.  Their generally quiet, yet
         often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
         sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
         soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
         domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
         a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
         gallinaceous.  All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
         rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
         been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
         ancestral ones.  They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
         of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
         succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
         wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
         account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
         Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.

         Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
         stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
         gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
         were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
         small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
         sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
         founder of the antiquated race.  Instead of being the youngest of the
         family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
         only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
         and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
         into its little body.  Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
         chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
         continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
         of affairs, whether in church or state.  No lesser sense of the infant
         fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
         perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
         person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
         much as looked towards her hopeful progeny.  No lower estimate could
         have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
         her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
         for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root.  Her nervous cluck, when
         the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
         squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
         beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
         defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
         the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
         every moment of the day.  By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
         as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
         did.

         Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
         permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
         grasping its cubic inch or two of body.  While she curiously examined
         its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
         tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
         she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink.  The daguerreotypist
         once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
         Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
         of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
         unintelligible one, as such clews generally are.  It was a feathered
         riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
         the egg had been addle!

         The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
         been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
         appeared, by her inability to lay an egg.  One day, however, by her
         self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
         eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
         herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
         evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
         carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
         estimated either in gold or precious stones.  Shortly after, there was
         a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
         family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
         matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt.  That
         afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
         was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
         the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass.  Hepzibah,
         on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
         Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
         which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous.  Thus
         unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
         perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
         supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
         tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
         Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
         egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
         himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
         pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part.  Hereupon, the
         offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
         notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
         peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
         delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.

         We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
         flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House.  But we deem it
         pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
         they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit.  They had the earth-smell
         in them, and contributed to give him health and substance.  Some of his
         occupations wrought less desirably upon him.  He had a singular
         propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
         constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
         of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom.  He
         said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
         in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
         smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
         flitting witchcraft made a new one.  But sometimes he would suddenly
         cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
         afterwards.  Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
         side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
         ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
         waters shook and disarranged them.  And the dark face, that so troubled
         Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
         the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well.  The
         truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
         judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
         that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
         and dreadful shape that typified his fate.

         On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
         church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
         missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
         church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
         in the garden.  In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
         guests made up the company.  One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
         of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
         questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
         regard.  The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
         Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
         than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
         elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
         inequality in the length of its skirts.   Clifford, on several
         occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
         of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
         frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December.  A
         man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
         agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
         the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
         had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
         now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner.  In fact,
         it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
         himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
         visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
         indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
         by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
         sensible of the withered leaf.

         So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
         ruinous arbor.  Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
         inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
         justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
         hospitality.   She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
         counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
         everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher.  And Uncle Venner,
         who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
         well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
         as a town-pump to give water.

         "Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
         together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
         afternoon.  They are very much like what I expect to have after I
         retire to my farm!"

         "Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
         talking about his farm.  But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
         We shall see!"

         "Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
         for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
         scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass.  It does
         seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
         property upon property.  If I had done so, I should feel as if
         Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
         city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
         big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."

         "Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
         she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
         concluding apothegm.  "But for this short life of ours, one would like
         a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."

         "It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
         Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
         they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
         systematizing Frenchman."

         "Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."

         And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
         fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
         bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
         and crushed with sugar.  These, with water,--but not from the fountain
         of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
         Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
         Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
         kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
         most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
         Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
         there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have.  With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion.  Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!"  As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.

Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all.  Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
        or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
        vibration.  Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
        sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
        natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
        animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
        him.  But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
        fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
        and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage.  He had
        been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
        such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.

        But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
        excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes.  He gazed vaguely and
        mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
        the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.

        "I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
        hardly shaping out the words.  "Many, many years have I waited for it!
        It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"

        Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
        never to have befallen you.  You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
        a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
        or less perceptibly, than their fellows.  Fate has no happiness in
        store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
        the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
        these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
        deserve to be called happiness!  Why not? If not the thing itself, it
        is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
        intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
        introspection.  Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
        not,--question not,--but make the most of it!

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Pyncheon-Garden  One of the few sources of amusement for Clifford is the garden, which, under Phoebe and Holgrave's tender care, has slowly been coming back to life. Phoebe often takes Clifford out into the garden, where she reads aloud to him. These little excursions with Phoebe always please Clifford, particularly when she reads poetry. In a magnanimous gesture, he decrees that the old chickens be allowed to roam free throughout the garden. They often can be found clustered close to Maule's Well. Earlier in the summer, Holgrave discovered some bean-vine seeds hidden away in a chest of drawers in a garret over one of the seven gables, stored away by a long-deceased Pyncheon ancestor. To see how long such seeds last, Clifford planted them, and now they have shot up as healthy bean vines laden with bright red blossoms, always swarmed by hummingbirds, to Clifford's great delight. The sight of Clifford admiring the hummingbirds and puttering about his garden with an innocence that is almost childlike warms Hepzibah's heart. At the same time, however, the sight of such happiness, and the thought that both she and Clifford have seen so many years wasted, give Hepzibah a slight twinge of sadness. Hepzibah has begun arranging Sunday-afternoon lunches with Phoebe, Clifford, Holgrave, and Uncle Venner. Clifford, whose social interactions are typically muted, is surprisingly animated at these lunches. He enjoys speaking with Uncle Venner, whose greatly advanced age makes Clifford feel almost young. Holgrave also makes friendly overtures toward Clifford, but the narrator notes the "questionable" expression that occasionally appears in the artist's eye. On one such occasion, Uncle Venner mentions that he dreams of eventually retiring to the workhouse, which he refers to as the "farm," and Clifford insinuates that he has bigger, more ambitious plans for Uncle Venner. Uncle Venner, however, politely refuses to be party to any such strategies, saying that he feels no burning desire to heap up property, since it seems to take away from what God has provided him with. As the sun begins to set, Clifford's high spirits decline. He mutters to himself, "I want my happiness. Many, many years have I waited for it. It is late. The narrator expresses pity for Clifford, for his past troubles and his half-imbecility, and says that Fate holds no happiness for Clifford unless he can find it in his time with Phoebe and luncheons like the one he has just consumed. The narrator advises Clifford to accept this as happiness: "Murmur not--question not--but make the most of it.


prompt:
Chapter: FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages.  Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street.  For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
     where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
     of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains.  It
     opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
     balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed.  At
     this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
     comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
     opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
     as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
     not very populous city.  But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
     seeing as any that the city could exhibit.  The pale, gray, childish,
     aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
     intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
     of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
     kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
     throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
     bright young girl!

     If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
     hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
     extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
     titillate, if not engross, his observation.  Things familiar to the
     youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
     to him.  A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
     and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
     vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
     and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
     forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
     along their track.  As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
             omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
     proper gripe and retentiveness.  Twice or thrice, for example, during
     the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
     House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
     dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
     shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
     it into the commonest routine of their convenience.  With the
     water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
     with just the same surprise as at first.  His mind took an apparently
     sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
     perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
     did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
     dust again.  It was the same with the railroad.  Clifford could hear
     the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
     from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
     flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street.  The idea
     of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
     and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
     surprise, the hundredth time as the first.

     Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
     the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
     swiftness of the passing moment.  It can merely be a suspended
     animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
     little use of immortality.  We are less than ghosts, for the time
     being, whenever this calamity befalls us.

     Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives.  All the
     antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
     characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
     fastidious senses.  He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
     former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
     the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
     Herculaneum.  The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
     acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
     likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
     to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
     trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
     and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood.  The
     baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
     on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
     dissonance of yore.  One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
     wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
     window.   Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
     carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
     edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
     apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
     Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
     scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
     stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
     fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
     though squeezed into smaller compass.  It was an ugly, little, venomous
     serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears.  But
     Clifford listened with rapturous delight.  The sound, however
     disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
     of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
     give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
     than he had attained in almost any other way.  Nevertheless, its charm
     lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
     his childish ears.

     He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
     nowadays.  And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
     old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
     used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
     daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
     Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
     not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
     lanes.

     But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
     way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations.  This
     was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
             feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
     under the wide and cool shadows of the elm.  With his quick
     professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
     arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
     melodies abroad.  He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
     Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
     wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
     little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
     his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
     made it his business to grind out.  In all their variety of
     occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
     her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
     cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
     harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance.  The Italian
     turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
     started into the most curious vivacity.  The cobbler wrought upon a
     shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
     glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
     toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
     eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
     page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
     gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank.  Yes;
     and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
     her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
     signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
     business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
     to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
     nothing finally to pass.  For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
     was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
     once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor.  Neither was
     the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
     was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
     of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
     strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book.  All were
     precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
     ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
     become wise.  Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
     for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
     acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

     The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
     prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
     feet.  He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
     passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
     to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
     and Clifford were looking down.  Every moment, also, he took off his
     Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape.  Sometimes, moreover,
     he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
     black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
     whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket.  The mean
     and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
     the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
     miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
             concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
     betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
     desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
     grossest form of the love of money.  Neither was there any possibility
     of satisfying the covetous little devil.  Phoebe threw down a whole
     handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
     them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
     series of pantomimic petitions for more.

     Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
     he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
     at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
     condition was here exemplified.  Clifford, however, was a being of
     another order.  He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
     too, at the figures which it set in motion.  But, after looking awhile
     at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
     spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
     weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
     fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
     when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
     them.

     Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
     pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
     them.  With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
     the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
     rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him.  This was
     made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
     flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
     reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
     and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
     uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables.  As a mere
     object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
     a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets.  The spectator
     feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
     commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
     self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
     stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
     his black coat.  In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
     some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
     centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
     then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
     it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
     collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
     it.  But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
     over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
     its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
     its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
     the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
     effect.  It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
     from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.

     So it proved with Clifford.  He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
     appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
     They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
     disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult.  At last, with tremulous limbs,
     he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
     would have been in the unguarded balcony.  As it was, the whole
     procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
     floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
     estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
     of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him.  Had Clifford
     attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
     but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
     victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
     magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
     easy to decide.  Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.

     But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
     hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
     him back.  Hepzibah shrieked.  Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
     horror, burst into sobs and tears.

     "Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.

     "I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath.  "Fear
     nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
     it, methinks it would have made me another man!"

     Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right.  He needed a
     shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
     ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
     profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
     world and to himself.  Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
     great final remedy--death!

     A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
     kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
     beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself.  In the
     incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
     Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
     poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
     for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
     sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.

     It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
     its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
     the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn.  On such
     a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
     conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
     on whatever spot of ground we stood.  The church-bells, with various
     tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
     another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
     over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
     now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
     crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
     afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word.  The
     air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
     mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
     utterance of prayer.

     Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
     they stepped into the street.  All of them, however unspiritual on
     other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
     very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
     for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
     finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
     of ascension-robes.  Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
     stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
     upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
     arched window.  In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
     holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
     ever.  She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
     one's mother-tongue.  Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
     her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
     small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
     stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
     fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
     rosebuds.

     The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
     street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
     that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.

     "Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
     you never go to church?"

     "No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"

     "Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
     once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"

     She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
     effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
     eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
     human brethren.  The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah.  She
     yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
     together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
     recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
     people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.

     "Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere.  We
     have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
     some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle.  Poor and
     forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"

     So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
     could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
     pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
     smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
     bettermost, to go to church.  They descended the staircase
     together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
     Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
     threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
     presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
     on them alone.  The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
     gave them no encouragement.  The warm sunny air of the street made them
     shiver.   Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
     step farther.

     "It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
     sadness.  "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
     right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
     which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
     with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
     "it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
     should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
     to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"

     They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door.  But,
     going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
     house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
     glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched.  They could
     not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
     behind it to watch them stealing out.  At the threshold, they felt his
     pitiless gripe upon them.  For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
     own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

     But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
     represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched.  On the
     contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
     so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
     moments as himself.  He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
     of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
     which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
     the very process of providing for their support.  In this respect he
     was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
     or short.  Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
     little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
     about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
     sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
     behind the accident that stupefied him.  He sometimes told Phoebe and
     Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
     or a very young man.  So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
     he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
     print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
     the dream of the preceding night.  Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
     woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
     what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
     trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it.  Had
     Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
     undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
     broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
     to bear.  It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
     morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
     would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
     misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
     But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
     enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
     seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
     slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.

     Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
     children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
     which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head.  Though
     prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
     with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
     window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
     schoolboys at a game of ball.  Their voices, also, were very pleasant
     to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
     flies do in a sunny room.

     Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports.  One
     afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
     soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
     been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
     Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
     his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
     his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
     enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
     survived so long!  Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
     window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
     soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
     imagination, on the nothing of their surface.  It was curious to see
     how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
     floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
     Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
     the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
     upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
     afloat so near their dusty pathway.  A great many put out their fingers
     or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
     gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
     sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

     At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
     happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
     burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
     keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
     arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
     a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.

     "Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon.  "What! Still blowing
     soap-bubbles!"

     The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
     bitterness of sarcasm in it.  As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
     fear came over him.  Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
     past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
     horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
     apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength.  Strength
     is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
     There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
     of his own connections.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Arched Window Hoping to lighten Clifford's mood, Phoebe often takes him to the window of the front gable, which looks out onto the street. Clifford is surprised by many of the new innovations that have come about while he was gone, although he has trouble making sense of the endless stream passing by: water carts, omnibuses, the sound of a passing train. He is happier when he sees things he remembers, such as rickety old-style carts, and laments the lack of stagecoaches. One day an organ-grinder, who works with a monkey and a moving diorama, begins playing in front of the Pyncheon house. The diorama has many figures, including a young man who repeatedly kisses a woman, a miser who counts his money, and a drunk who continually takes swigs of liquor. The narrator notes the futility of the figures' efforts, since once the music stops, they cease to move, and they are no closer to finishing their activity than before. The organ-grinder's monkey, an ugly little thing, -constantly holds out his hairy palm for change and is never -satisfied. The narrator thinks this greedy, ugly monkey is an amusing caricature of many New Englanders' souls, but Clifford is the only one to recognize the horror of the monkey, and he recoils from it. Another day, a procession passes through the streets. The sight of so many people crowded into the same place at once greatly affects Clifford, who suddenly steps onto the windowsill and seems about to jump off. Phoebe and Hepzibah pull him back down, but the narrator suggests that the leap may not have been so bad and that it might have awakened Clifford from his thick, endless stupor. On Sunday, the entire town turns out for church, as does Phoebe. Watching them all go, Clifford suggests to Hepzibah that perhaps they too could go to church. They dress and walk out the door, but then immediately stop. They cannot make themselves go farther. Clifford laments that he and Hepzibah have become ghosts and are tied to the Pyncheon house forever. Another afternoon, Clifford amuses himself by blowing bubbles out the window, only to have one land on Judge Pyncheon, who looks up to the window and makes a slightly sarcastic comment to Clifford before moving on. It's a brief exchange, but it leaves Clifford paralyzed by fear


prompt:
Chapter: IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House.  Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset.  Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived.  It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles.  But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford.  Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
             sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
             practised with the world.  As all is activity and vicissitude to the
             new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
             undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.

             Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
             thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
             window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
             And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
             childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
             of the day and evening.

             This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
             little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe.  The old
             house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
             in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
             Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
             to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
             with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
             affection, and one bitter sense of wrong.  Clifford, the reader may
             perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
             fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
             him.  But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
             and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
             of organized life, and vibrates from one to another.  A flower, for
             instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
             Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
             converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
             sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
             sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast.  Unless she had
             now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
             suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
             obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
             metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
             panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
             ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
             ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
             chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
             native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
             soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
             unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
             old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.

             Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
             although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
             perhaps more precious.  She was not so constantly gay, but had her
             moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
             former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
             better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
             himself.  Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
             some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
             into the infinite.  She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
             alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.

             The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
             intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist.  Inevitably, by the
             pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
             of some familiarity.  Had they met under different circumstances,
             neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
             thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
             should have proved a principle of mutual attraction.  Both, it is true,
             were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
             ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
             in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
             world-wide distance.  During the early part of their acquaintance,
             Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
             simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances.  Nor was she
             yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
             and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
             familiar way.

             The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
             his history.  Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
             point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
             creditably, an autobiographic volume.  A romance on the plan of Gil
             Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
             romance.  The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
             hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
             Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
             whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
             would imagine for his hero.  Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
             proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
             humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
             possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
             school.  Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
             self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
             his natural force of will.  Though now but twenty-two years old
             (lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
             been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
             store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
             of a country newspaper.  He had subsequently travelled New England and
             the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
             manufactory of cologne-water and other essences.  In an episodical way
             he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
             success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
             streams.  As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
             packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
             to see Italy, and part of France and Germany.  At a later period he had
             spent some months in a community of Fourierists.  Still more recently
             he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
                     assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
                     Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
             very remarkable endowments.

             His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
             his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
             preceding ones.  It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
             adventurer, who had his bread to earn.  It would be thrown aside as
             carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
             equally digressive means.  But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
             showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
             amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
             Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
             therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
             individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
             soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
             had carried his conscience along with him.  It was impossible to know
             Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact.   Hepzibah had seen
             it.  Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
             which such a certainty inspires.  She was startled, however, and
             sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
             he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own.  He
             made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
             lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
             could establish its right to hold its ground.

             Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
             He was too calm and cool an observer.  Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
             heart, seldom or never.  He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
             and her brother, and Phoebe herself.  He studied them attentively, and
             allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
             him.  He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
             he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
             evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
             In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
             not heart-sustenance.  Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
             much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
             for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.

             Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
             as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
             seldom saw.

             "Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.

             "As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
             easily disturbed."

             "How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave.  "By things without, or by thoughts
             within?"

             "I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
             piquancy.  "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
             guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun.  Latterly, since I have
             begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
             closely into his moods.  He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
             is made all solemn and sacred by it.  When he is cheerful,--when the
             sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
             the light reaches, but no further.  It is holy ground where the shadow
             falls!"

             "How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist.  "I can
             understand the feeling, without possessing it.  Had I your
             opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
             the full depth of my plummet-line!"

             "How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
             "What is Cousin Clifford to you?"

             "Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
             "Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
             at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
             bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.  Men and women, and
             children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
             certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
             from what he sees them to be now.  Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
             complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
             requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it.  A mere
             observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
                     only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."

             The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
             which they had touched upon.  Phoebe and he were young together; nor
             had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
             beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
             and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
             bright as on the first day of creation.  Man's own youth is the world's
             youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
             granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
             into whatever shape he likes.  So it was with Holgrave.  He could talk
             sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
             said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
             world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
             being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
             all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
             promise of becoming.  He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
             young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
             mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
             are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
             very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
             accomplished in his own lifetime.  It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
             it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
             grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
             and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
             thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
             begin anew.

             As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
             centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right.  His error lay
             in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
             destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
             suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
             applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
             achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
             to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
             against it.  Yet it was well for him to think so.  This enthusiasm,
             infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
             an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
             pure, and make his aspirations high.  And when, with the years settling
             down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
             inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
             of his sentiments.  He would still have faith in man's brightening
             destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
             his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
             he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
             close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
             kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.

             Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
             thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
             necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
             and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
             their own.  He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
             thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
             yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think.  The true
             value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
             strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
             change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
             of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
             his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
             other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
             certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
             champion of some practicable cause.  Altogether in his culture and want
             of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
             practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
             magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
             the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
             infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
             fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
             native land.

             His career it would be difficult to prefigure.  There appeared to be
             qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
             to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
             world's prizes within his reach.  But these matters are delightfully
             uncertain.  At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
             just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
             of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
             another word.  The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
             gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
             brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people.  Like
             certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
             first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
             sober aspect after washing-day.

             But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
             afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden.  In that point of
             view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
             faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
             little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
             pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe.  Her thought
             had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
             he had grown warmer now.  Without such purpose on her part, and
             unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
             home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct.  With the insight on
             which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
             and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
             story-book.  But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
             depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
             than we think.  Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
             capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
             what he dreamed of doing in the world.  He poured himself out as to
             another self.   Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
             and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
             sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
             reservoir which it finds.  But, had you peeped at them through the
             chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
             color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
             young girl!

             At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
             Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
             Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
             House.  Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
             which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
             speak of the influences of the Past.  One subject, indeed, is but the
             reverberation of the other.

             "Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
             earnest tone of his preceding conversation.  "It lies upon the Present
             like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
             were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
             of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
             needs to be decently buried.  Just think a moment, and it will startle
             you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
             the matter the right word!"

             "But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.

             "For example, then," continued Holgrave:  "a dead man, if he happens to
             have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
             intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
             longer dead than he.  A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
             living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions.  We read in
             dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
             pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
             of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
             worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
             Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
             obstructs us!  Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
             immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
             must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
             on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
             of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
             interfere.  I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
             houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"

             "And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"

             "But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
             no man shall build his house for posterity.  Why should he? He might
             just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
             guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
             great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
             the same figure in the world that he himself does.  If each generation
             were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
             comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
             which society is now suffering for.  I doubt whether even our public
             edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
             churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
             brick.  It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
             years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
             reform the institutions which they symbolize."

             "How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay.  "It makes me
             dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"

             "I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave.  "Now, this old
             Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
             shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
             low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
             crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
             and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
             purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"

             "Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.

             "Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
             Holgrave.  "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
             abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
             been declaiming.  I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
             how to hate it.  By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
             wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
             great-grandfather?"

             "Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
             two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
             been here.  She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
             began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him.  And you, Mr.
             Holgrave look as if you thought so too!  How singular that you should
             believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
             great deal worthier of credit!"

             "I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
             however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
             theory.  Now, see:  under those seven gables, at which we now look
             up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
             descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
             the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
             there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
             hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
             dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
             have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
             plant and endow a family.  To plant a family! This idea is at the
             bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do.  The truth is,
             that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
             into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
             ancestors.  Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
             hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
             pipes.  In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
             instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
             them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
             to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."

             "You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
             with herself whether she ought to take offence.

             "I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
             vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him.   "The truth is
             as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
             mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
             street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
             prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
             inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
             its resemblance to the old portrait?"

             "How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
             with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
             laugh.  "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"

             "I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing.  "I believe
             I am a little mad.  This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
             strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
             As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
             Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
             form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."

             "Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.

             "Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave.  "Well, such is
             literary fame! Yes.  Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
             marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
             figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
             respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
             canonized bead-roll with which it was associated.  In the humorous
             line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
             pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion.  But shall I read you
             my story?"

             "Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
             laughingly,--"nor very dull."

             As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
             for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
             the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Daguerreotypist  Phoebe has now been at the Pyncheon house for a month. Since she is young and hungry for company of her own age, she becomes friends with Holgrave, the daguerreotypist. Their conversations are especially important to Phoebe, who craves a break from the dour company of Clifford and Hepzibah. Phoebe discovers that Holgrave, at the age of twenty-two, has already lived a diverse life, having worked a dozen jobs and visited not only the Midwestern states but also parts of Europe. He is an excitable young man who has been impressed with the ideas of revolutionaries. He makes a long speech to Phoebe about how everything in their world--their books, their laws, their houses--is based on the works of dead men, and he thinks each generation should tear down the institutions of the past and put up new ones in their place. These ideas unnerve Phoebe, but she listens nonetheless. The narrator notes that Holgrave's "earnestness and heightened color" which are increasingly evident as he speaks, might lead one to imagined that he is in love with Phoebe, although she has never been able to discern anything of the sort in his heart. Holgrave makes many inquiries about Clifford, as he is very curious about both the man's welfare and his past. Phoebe does not share Holgrave's inquisitiveness and is consequently unable to give him any of the information he seeks. We are told that Holgrave is not a particularly well-read young man, and that while he considers himself a thinker, he still has much to learn, including how to really think about things. Nonetheless, he possesses a natural courage and resolve that are made all the more admirable by the fact that they have survived many trials. Holgrave is wrongly convinced that he can read Phoebe like an open book, and he fails to recognize that such personalities often conceal deep thoughts and emotions. Holgrave then expresses to Phoebe his belief in a Pyncheon curse, at least as much as it has caused something of a Pyncheon "lunacy. Phoebe rejects the notion, asking whether such lunacy might be catching. Holgrave tells her that it is no superstition, and that he has written an in-depth story about the ancient Maule curse for a magazine. Holgrave asks Phoebe if she would like to hear it, and when she assents, he reads it to her.