Chapter: HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.  The
street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an
elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to
every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.  On my
occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down
Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these
two antiquities,--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human
countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and
sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and
accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.  Were these to be
worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest
and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity,
    which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement.  But the
    story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of
    two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a
    bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
    prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a
    similar period.  It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
    with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
    otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme.
    With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the
    foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint
    exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind,--pointing, too,
    here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and
    walls,--we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not
    very remote from the present day.  Still, there will be a connection
    with the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and
    to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete--which,
    if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how
    much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human
    life.  Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the
    little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the
    germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant
    time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which
    mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more
    enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

    The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the
    first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of
    ground.  Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of
    Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,
    before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path.  A natural spring of soft
    and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the
    Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew Maule to build a
    hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote
    from what was then the centre of the village.  In the growth of the
    town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by
    this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a
    prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the
    proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the
    strength of a grant from the legislature.  Colonel Pyncheon, the
    claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was
    characterized by an iron energy of purpose.  Matthew Maule, on the
    other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what
    he considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in
    protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had
    hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
    No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence.  Our
    acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition.
    It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive
    opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a
    matter of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheon's claim were not unduly
    stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of
    Matthew Maule.  What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact
    that this controversy between two ill-matched antagonists--at a period,
    moreover, laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more
    weight than now--remained for years undecided, and came to a close only
    with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil.  The mode of
    his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day, from what it
    did a century and a half ago.  It was a death that blasted with strange
    horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem
    almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his
    habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.

    Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft.
    He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach
    us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who
    take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to
    all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
    Clergymen, judges, statesmen,--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of
    their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to
    applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably
    deceived.  If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve
    less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with
    which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
    judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
    brethren, and wives.  Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not
    strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have
    trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in
    the throng of his fellow sufferers.  But, in after days, when the
    frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly
    Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from
    witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an
    invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the
    condemnation of Matthew Maule.  It was well known that the victim had
    recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutor's
    conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for
    his spoil.  At the moment of execution--with the halter about his neck,
    and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene
    Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of
    which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very
    words.  "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly
    look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,--"God will give him
    blood to drink!"  After the reputed wizard's death, his humble
    homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp.  When
    it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family
    mansion-spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to
    endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first
    covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking
    of the head among the village gossips.  Without absolutely expressing a
    doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and
    integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
    nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an
    unquiet grave.  His home would include the home of the dead and buried
    wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
    privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
    future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
    Pyncheon blood were to be born.  The terror and ugliness of Maule's
    crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly
    plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
    melancholy house.  Why, then,--while so much of the soil around him was
    bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon
    prefer a site that had already been accurst?

    But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
    from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's ghost,
    or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious.  Had he
    been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was
    ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground.  Endowed with
    commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
    together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
    out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
    objection to it.  On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which
    a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of
    his breed and generation, was impenetrable.  He therefore dug his
    cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of
    earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away
    the fallen leaves.  It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
    ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
    the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
    of its pristine quality.  Whether its sources were disturbed by the
    depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the
    bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued
    to be called, grew hard and brackish.  Even such we find it now; and
    any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
    intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

    The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
    edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe
    the property of the soil had been wrested.  Not improbably he was the
    best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
    expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
    aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist.  Nor was
    it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
    character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
    penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
    of his father's deadly enemy.  At all events, Thomas Maule became the
    architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
    faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
    together.

    Thus the great house was built.  Familiar as it stands in the writer's
    recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
    boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of
    a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
    interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as it
    stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult
    to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
    The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and
    sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain
    give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all
    the town to be his guests.  A ceremony of consecration, festive as well
    as religious, was now to be performed.  A prayer and discourse from the
    Rev.  Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
    throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense
    by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
    authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight
    and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins.  The
    carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for
    the vast circumference of a pasty.  A codfish of sixty pounds, caught
    in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder.   The
    chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke,
    impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes,
    spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance.  The
    mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils,
    was at once an invitation and an appetite.

    Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call
    it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its
    way to church.  All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing
    edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations
    of mankind.  There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the
    street, but in pride, not modesty.  Its whole visible exterior was
    ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a
    Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed
    of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
    walls was overspread.  On every side the seven gables pointed sharply
    towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of
    edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney.  The
    many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the
    sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,
    projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,
    threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms.  Carved
    globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories.  Little spiral
    rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks.  On the triangular
    portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up
    that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage
    of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all
    so bright.  All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
    broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
    on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression
    of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to
    make among men's daily interests.

    The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door,
    was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an
    open porch, with benches beneath its shelter.  Under this arched
    doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the
    clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
    aristocracy there was in town or county.  Thither, too, thronged the
    plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number.
    Just within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some
    of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others
    into the statelier rooms,--hospitable alike to all, but still with a
    scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each.  Velvet garments
    sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves,
    venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy
    to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the
    tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
    jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps
    helped to build.

    One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
    concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
    visitors.  The founder of this stately mansion--a gentleman noted for
    the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have
    stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many
    eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn
    festival.  He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had
    not beheld him.  This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheon's part became
    still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province
    made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception.  The
    lieutenant-governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated
    glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady
    from her side-saddle, and crossed the Colonel's threshold, without
    other greeting than that of the principal domestic.

    This person--a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
    deportment--found it necessary to explain that his master still
    remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which, an hour
    before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.

    "Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county, taking
    the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
    lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
    received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
    consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
    noticing it.  But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to
    neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be
    said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself.
    Call your master instantly."

    "Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity, but
    with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe
    character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "my master's orders were
    exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no
    discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service.  Let who list
    open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor's own voice should
    bid me do it!"

    "Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor, who
    had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in
    station to play a little with his dignity.  "I will take the matter
    into my own hands.  It is time that the good Colonel came forth to
    greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a
    sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask
    it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much
    behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself!"

    Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might
    of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he
    advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new
    panels reecho with a loud, free knock.  Then, looking round, with a
    smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response.  As none came,
    however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as
    at first.  And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the
    lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he
    so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders
    whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead.  Be that as it
    might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.
    When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep,
    dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the
    guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine
    or spirits.

    "Strange, forsooth!--very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
    whose smile was changed to a frown.  "But seeing that our host sets us
    the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it
    aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy."

    He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open
    by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the
    outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new
    house.  It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the
    long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the window-hangings and
    the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir,
    which yet was more like a hush.  A shadow of awe and half-fearful
    anticipation--nobody knew wherefore, nor of what--had all at once
    fallen over the company.

    They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
    lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the room
    in advance of them.  At the first glimpse they beheld nothing
    extraordinary:  a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat
    darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the
    wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
    the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in
    his hand.  Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the
    table before him.  He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front
    of which stood the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his
    dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness
    that had impelled them into his private retirement.

    A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that
    ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among the guests,
    and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to
    shriek with terror.  The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,
    when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there
    was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's
    stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was
    saturated with it.  It was too late to give assistance.  The
    iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and
    strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a
    tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious
    awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke
    loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old
    Matthew Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to
    drink!"

    Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain, at one
    time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,--thus early
    had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables!

    Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise
    in its day.  There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely drifted
    down to the present time, how that appearances indicated violence; that
    there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a
    bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was
    dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled.  It was
    averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonel's chair,
    was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the
    figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence, in the
    rear of the house.  But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of
    this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now
    related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong
    themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where
    the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the
    earth.  For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to
    that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenant-governor was
    said to have seen at the Colonel's throat, but which vanished away, as
    he advanced farther into the room.  Certain it is, however, that there
    was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body.
    One,--John Swinnerton by name,--who appears to have been a man of
    eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to
    be a case of apoplexy.  His professional brethren, each for himself,
    adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
    in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
    bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it
    in the unlearned peruser of their opinions.  The coroner's jury sat
    upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable
    verdict of "Sudden Death!"

    It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious
    suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any
    particular individual as the perpetrator.  The rank, wealth, and
    eminent character of the deceased must have insured the strictest
    scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance.  As none such is on record,
    it is safe to assume that none existed. Tradition,--which sometimes
    brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild
    babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now
    congeals in newspapers,--tradition is responsible for all contrary
    averments.  In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon, which was printed,
    and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many
    felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career, the happy
    seasonableness of his death.  His duties all performed,--the highest
    prosperity attained,--his race and future generations fixed on a stable
    basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to
    come,--what other upward step remained for this good man to take, save
    the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious
    clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the
    least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world
    with the clutch of violence upon his throat.

    The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
    destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the
    inherent instability of human affairs.  It might fairly be anticipated
    that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their
    prosperity, than wear away and destroy it.  For, not only had his son
    and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was
    a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the
    General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of
    Eastern lands.  These possessions--for as such they might almost
    certainly be reckoned--comprised the greater part of what is now known
    as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were more extensive than
    many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince's territory, on European
    soil.  When the pathless forest that still covered this wild
    principality should give place--as it inevitably must, though perhaps
    not till ages hence--to the golden fertility of human culture, it would
    be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood.  Had the
    Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great
    political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would
    have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available.
    But, in spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this
    appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and
    sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends.  So far as the
    prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon.
    His son lacked not merely the father's eminent position, but the talent
    and force of character to achieve it: he could, therefore, effect
    nothing by dint of political interest; and the bare justice or legality
    of the claim was not so apparent, after the Colonel's decease, as it
    had been pronounced in his lifetime.  Some connecting link had slipped
    out of the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.

    Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at
    various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what
    they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right.  But, in course of
    time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,
    and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers.  These last, if
    they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea
    of any man's asserting a right--on the strength of mouldy parchments,
    signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead
    and forgotten--to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested
    from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil.  This impalpable
    claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from
    generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,
    which all along characterized the Pyncheons.   It caused the poorest
    member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and
    might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it.
    In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal
    grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any
    truly valuable quality.  In the baser sort, its effect was to increase
    the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of
    a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
    of his dreams.  Years and years after their claim had passed out of the
    public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's
    ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an
    unbroken wilderness.   Where the old land surveyor had put down woods,
    lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the
    villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value
    of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately
    forming a princedom for themselves.

    In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one
    descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,
    and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original
    founder.  His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as
    distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted
    with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth.  At two or three
    epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative
    of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the
    traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is
    the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be
    new-shingled!"  From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house
    with singular tenacity of home attachment.  For various reasons,
    however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on
    paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the
    successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to
    their moral right to hold it.  Of their legal tenure there could be no
    question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
    from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the
    way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon.  If so, we are left to dispose of
    the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property--conscious of
    wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great guilt
    of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities.  And
    supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of
    expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great
    misfortune, than the reverse?

    We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the
    history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the
    House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the
    rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house
    itself.  As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used
    to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its
    depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there,--the old
    Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique
    babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or
    saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age.  Had we the secret of that
    mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
    revelations to our page.  But there was a story, for which it is
    difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew
    Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and
    that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they
    could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not
    as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and
    happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
    crisis of life's bitterest sorrow.  The popular imagination, indeed,
    long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and
    the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold
    was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a
    part of the Pyncheon inheritance.  If one of the family did but gurgle
    in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between
    jest and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!"  The sudden death of
    a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
    to what have been related of the Colonel's exit, was held as giving
    additional probability to the received opinion on this topic.  It was
    considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
    Pyncheon's picture--in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
    will--remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died.  Those
    stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and
    so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of
    the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
    up and blossom there.  To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
    superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
    ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own
    punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.

    The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
    centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
    most other New England families during the same period of time.
    Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
    the general characteristics of the little community in which they
    dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
    home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
    its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
    and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
    anywhere else.  During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
    adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
    reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
    Seven Gables from confiscation.  For the last seventy years the most
    noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
    calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death--for
    so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by the criminal act of
    another.  Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
    brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
    Pyncheon.  The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
    either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
    lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly--an argument
    of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
    monarchy,--the high respectability and political influence of the
    criminal's connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
    perpetual imprisonment.  This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
    before the action of our story commences.  Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
    that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
    summoned forth from his living tomb.

    It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
    almost forgotten murder.  He was an old bachelor, and possessed of
    great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
    constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property.  Being of
    an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to
    rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought
    himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the
    wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his
    life.  Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of
    the ill-gotten spoil,--with the black stain of blood sunken deep into
    it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,--the question
    occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late
    hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity.  To a man living so
    much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and
    antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a
    period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong.  It
    was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively
    have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven
    Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable
    tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among
    his Pyncheon relatives.  Their exertions had the effect of suspending
    his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by
    the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented
    from doing in his proper lifetime.  But there is no one thing which men
    so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath
    patrimonial property away from their own blood.  They may love other
    individuals far better than their relatives,--they may even cherish
    dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death,
    the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to
    send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial
    that it looks like nature.  In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the
    energy of disease.  It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples
    of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,
    together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of
    his next legal representative.

    This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had been
    convicted of the uncle's murder.  The new heir, up to the period of his
    accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once
    reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
    society.   In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won
    higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of
    the original Puritan.  Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study
    of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
    attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
    court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of
    judge.  Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two
    terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
    branches of the State legislature.   Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably
    an honor to his race.  He had built himself a country-seat within a few
    miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as
    could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and
    virtue--as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election--befitting
    the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman.

    There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of
    the Judge's prosperity.  In respect to natural increase, the breed had
    not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out.  The only members of
    the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a
    single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the
    thirty years' prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
    who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven
    Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.
    She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her
    choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had
    repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old
    mansion or his own modern residence.  The last and youngest Pyncheon
    was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the
    Judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or
    property, and died early and in poor circumstances.  His widow had
    recently taken another husband.

    As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
    For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
    Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
    suffered so unjust a death.  To all appearance, they were a quiet,
    honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
    individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or
    if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any
    hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony, it
    was never acted upon, nor openly expressed.  Nor would it have been
    singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables
    was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully
    their own.  There is something so massive, stable, and almost
    irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank
    and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a
    right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few
    poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in
    their secret minds.  Such is the case now, after so many ancient
    prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
    ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be
    proud, and the low were content to be abased.  Thus the Maules, at all
    events, kept their resentments within their own breasts.  They were
    generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with
    unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or
    following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there
    about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse
    as the natural home of their old age.  At last, after creeping, as it
    were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque
    puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner
    or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian.
    For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the
    directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of
    Matthew Maule's descendants.  His blood might possibly exist elsewhere;
    here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had
    ceased to keep an onward course.

    So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out
    from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an
    effect that was felt rather than spoken of--by an hereditary character
    of reserve.  Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
    grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity
    or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness
    and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step.  It was
    this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from
    human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life.  It certainly
    operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only
    inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with
    which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,
    continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches.  The mantle, or
    rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his
    children.  They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes;
    the family eye was said to possess strange power.  Among other
    good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned
    them,--that of exercising an influence over people's dreams.  The
    Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves
    in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than
    bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy
    commonwealth of sleep.  Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to
    reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting
    them as altogether fabulous.

    A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled mansion in
    its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close.
    The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to
    be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice
    was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small,
    built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of
    common life.   Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence
    may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally,
    that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there.  But as
    for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its
    boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered
    chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest
    part of its reality.  So much of mankind's varied experience had passed
    there,--so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,--that
    the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.  It was
    itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of
    rich and sombre reminiscences.

    The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
    meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it
    had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon.  In
    front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon Elm,
    which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well
    be termed gigantic.  It had been planted by a great-grandson of the
    first Pyncheon, and, though now four-score years of age, or perhaps
    nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing
    its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven
    gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage.  It
    gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.
    The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable
    was now precisely on a line with it.  On either side extended a ruinous
    wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy
    yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous
    fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to
    say, two or three feet long.  Behind the house there appeared to be a
    garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now
    infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and
    outbuildings that stood on another street.  It would be an omission,
    trifling, indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss
    that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and
    on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye
    to a crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in
    the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of
    the gables.  They were called Alice's Posies.  The tradition was, that
    a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the
    dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of
    soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her
    grave.  However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and
    sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying,
    gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the
    ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty,
    and grew melancholy in the effort.

    There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we
    greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which
    we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable
    edifice.  In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second
    story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, divided
    horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment,
    such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date.  This
    same shop-door had been a subject of no slight mortification to the
    present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as well as to some of
    her predecessors.  The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle; but,
    since the reader must needs be let into the secret, he will please to
    understand, that, about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found
    himself involved in serious financial difficulties.  The fellow
    (gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a
    spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or
    the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he
    bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a
    shop-door through the side of his ancestral residence.  It was the
    custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods and
    transact business in their own dwellings.  But there was something
    pitifully small in this old Pyncheon's mode of setting about his
    commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all
    beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and
    would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good
    one.  Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his
    veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there.

    Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and
    barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never once
    been opened.  The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the
    little shop remained just as he had left them.  It used to be affirmed,
    that the dead shop-keeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an
    apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his
    wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any night of
    the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages of his
    day-book.  From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared
    to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts
    balance.

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

 The Old Pyncheon Family In the mid-1600s, the farmer Matthew Maule builds a small house next to a lovely, clear spring in what will become a small, well-to-do Massachusetts town. A local landowner named Colonel Pyncheon, who wants the land for himself, accuses Maule of witchcraft at a time of mass hysteria against witches. Maule is convicted and hanged, but, before he dies, he warns that God will give Pyncheon blood to drink. Undaunted by this curse, Colonel Pyncheon builds a house with seven gables, vertical triangular points on a house that run from the roof's center to its edge. Maule's own son helps design and build the house, and on the day of its opening, a great feast is held. When Colonel Pyncheon fails to greet his distinguished guests, they charge into one of his rooms, only to find him sitting dead at his desk. Blood coats his beard and his shirt. There is no evidence of foul play, but no one knows how he died, and rumors of strangulation persist. It is whispered that a mysterious figure was seen fleeing the scene. The narrator goes to great lengths to discount these rumors. Future generations of the Pyncheon family continue to occupy the house over the next century and a half, but they are never able to claim one of the dead Colonel's final acquisitions, a gigantic tract of land in Maine. Generations of the family are raised thinking the land is rightfully theirs, and they make unsuccessful attempts to obtain it. The area where the Pyncheon house was built falls out of fashion. Thirty years before the novel is set, a wealthy Pyncheon is murdered by one of his nephews, another Pyncheon. The killer is convicted and jailed for life, but the dead man's other nephew, an intelligent man who becomes known as Judge Pyncheon, is successful and builds a large house just outside of town. The sister of the jailed Pyncheon continues to live alone in the house of the seven gables. The Maules, on the other hand, have not had such a clear descent through history. Many of them have no knowledge of Matthew Maule or his curse on Colonel Pyncheon, and some are not even aware that they are of Maule descent. Nevertheless, many still retain the Maules' characteristic alienating reserve, and some are believed by townspeople to have inherited mysterious powers from their forefather. The chapter ends with a few descriptions. Outside the house of the seven gables stands a gigantic elm planted over eighty years ago by one of the earliest Pyncheons. In a nook between two of the gables grows a cluster of flowers known as Alice's Posies, named after an old legend that told of Alice Pyncheon flinging up flower seeds for fun; the resulting flowers were said to thrive in the dust and dirt collected on the roof. The house also contains a door on the front gable, leading to a little shop where a Pyncheon family member who found himself in dire financial straits once took to being a merchant

