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.




THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.

"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon's black servant.  "Does the house need any repair?  Well it
may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I
was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last
Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood
seven-and-thirty years.  No wonder if there should be a job to do on
the roof."

"Don't know what massa wants," answered Scipio.  "The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, As he does?"

"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said
the carpenter with a laugh.  "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find
me his man.  And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables.  Even if
the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together."

"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?"

"No matter, darky," said the carpenter.  "Do you think nobody is to
look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you
happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule's humble
respects to her.  She has brought a fair face from Italy,--fair, and
gentle, and proud,--has that same Alice Pyncheon!"

"He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand.  "The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!"

This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised.  The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.

He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day.  This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill.  Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm.  It is not the less certain,
   however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who
   died for this horrible crime of witchcraft.  Their graves, in the
   crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the
   occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them.  Old Matthew Maule,
   especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
   rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and
   was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday.  This
   pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no
           manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
   mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
   which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent.  The
   ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
   distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
   rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood.  His terms
   were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
   cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
   given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
   the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
   though it should be a thousand years after his death.  It was a wild
   story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
   could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
   Maule had been.

   Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
   popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
   questionable traits.  It is wonderful how many absurdities were
   promulgated in reference to the young man.  He was fabled, for example,
   to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
   matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
   stage-manager of a theatre.  There was a great deal of talk among the
   neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
   the witchcraft of Maule's eye.  Some said that he could look into
   people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
   could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
   errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
   it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
   of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
   But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
   was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
   next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
   of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.

   After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
   finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
   his way towards the House of the Seven Gables.  This noted edifice,
   though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
   respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town.  The
   present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
   to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
   childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather.  In the very act
   of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
   old Puritan to be a corpse.  On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
   visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
   subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
   in various cities on the continent of Europe.  During this period, the
   family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
   allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
   keeping the premises in thorough repair.  So faithfully had this
   contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
   house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
   condition.  The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
   roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
   entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
   as if it had been new only a week ago.

   The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
   expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance.  You could
   see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it.  A
   huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
   outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the
   housekeeper--stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
   poultry which a countryman had brought for sale.  Now and then a
   maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
   slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
   the house.  At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
   over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which
   had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
   autumn,--was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
   and beautiful and delicate as they.  Her presence imparted an
   indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice.  In other
   respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
   to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
   headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
   of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
   symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
   and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.

   There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
   passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.

   "Three o'clock!" said he to himself.  "My father told me that dial was
   put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death.  How truly it has
   kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
   creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"

   It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
   for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
   work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
   where the better class of tradesmen made application.  But the
   carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
   at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
   hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
   standing on soil which should have been his own.  On this very site,
   beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
   pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
   and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
   Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds.  So young Maule went
   straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
   gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
   stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.

   Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
   the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.

   "Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
   Scipio, down in his throat.  "Anybody think he beat on the door with
   his biggest hammer!"

   "Here I am!" said Maule sternly.  "Show me the way to your master's
   parlor."

   As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
   thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
   rooms above stairs.  It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
   brought with her from beyond the sea.  The fair Alice bestowed most of
   her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
   apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad.  She was of foreign
   education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
   in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.

   As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black
   Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
   master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
   moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
   windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
   Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
   elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
           unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
   richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
   corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
   sufficient garment. Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow
   tinge diffused through all their artful splendor--hung on the walls.
   Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
   inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
   bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
   ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
   picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
   however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
   its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
    nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.

    There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
    handsomely furnished room.  One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of
    a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
    ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
    touch of fingers.  The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
    Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
    strong expression of character.

    At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
    sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
    in France.  He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
    flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
    on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
    the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
    gold.  On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
    Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
    proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
    notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence.  It was not
    that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he
    would have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that
    a person in Maule's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would
    trouble himself about it one way or the other.

    The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
    himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.

    "You sent for me," said he.  "Be pleased to explain your business, that
    I may go back to my own affairs."

    "Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly.  "I did not mean to tax
    your time without a recompense.  Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas
    or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the builder of this house?"

    "Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,--"son of him who built the
    house,--grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil."

    "I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with
    undisturbed equanimity.  "I am well aware that my grandfather was
    compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
    to the foundation-site of this edifice.  We will not, if you please,
    renew the discussion.  The matter was settled at the time, and by the
    competent authorities,--equitably, it is to be presumed,--and, at all
    events, irrevocably.  Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental
    reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.
    And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this
    irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the
    matter."

    "If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the
    carpenter, "in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his
    blood, you are welcome to it."

    "I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven
    Gables, with a smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your
    hereditary resentments--justifiable or otherwise--may have had a
    bearing on my affairs.  You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon
    family, ever since my grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still
    unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward?"

    "Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his
    face,--"very often,--from my father!"

    "This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to
    consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the
    very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my
    grandfather's decease.  It was well known, to those in his confidence,
    that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay.  Now, Colonel
    Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
    public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish
    ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable
    scheme.  It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not
    apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the
    matter of this Eastern claim.  In a word, I believe,--and my legal
    advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a
    certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my grandfather was in
    possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim,
    but which has since disappeared."

    "Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a
    dark smile on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with
    the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family?"

    "Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"

    Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor
    of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
    It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to
            stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief
    pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between
    the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the
    Pyncheons.  It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged
    though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest
    with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great
    Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of garden-ground.  A very
    aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression,
    in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had
    been shovelled into Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a very
    shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
    Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document,
    it was a by-word that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's
    skeleton hand.  So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these
    fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter
            of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be
    searched.  Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably,
    the right hand of the skeleton was gone.

    Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular
    rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to
    chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son, and the
    father of this present Matthew Maule.  And here Mr. Pyncheon could
    bring an item of his own personal evidence into play.  Though but a
    child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's
    father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the
    very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and
    the carpenter were at this moment talking.  Certain papers belonging to
    Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been
    spread out on the table.

    Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.

    "My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a
    riddle of his countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the
    bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have
    carried off one of those papers!"

    "I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr.
    Pyncheon, with haughty composure.  "Nor will it become me to resent any
    rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself.  A gentleman, before
    seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will
    first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
    disagreeableness of the means.  It does so in the present instance."

    He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to
    the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to
    the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the
    Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a
    cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind
    of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the
    old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven
    Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so
    urgently required.

    The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its
            extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account
    of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon's
    portrait.  This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so
    intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built
    into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant
    the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
    All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the
    carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and
    giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without
    attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists.  And finally,
    at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the
    seven-gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost
    all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending
    bodily from its frame.  But such incredible incidents are merely to be
    mentioned aside.

    "Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the
    proposal.  "Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his
    grave!"

    "He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter
    composedly.  "But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does
    Matthew Maule.  I have no other terms to propose."

    Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions,
    still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might
    at least be made matter of discussion.  He himself had no personal
    attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with
    his childish residence in it.  On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty
    years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it,
    as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so
    ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair.  His long abode in foreign
    parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral
    halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
    look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point
    of splendor or convenience.  It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to
    the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to
    support, after realizing his territorial rights.  His steward might
    deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor
    himself.  In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return
    to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that
    more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased
    wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion.  The Eastern claim once
    fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr.
    Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be worth
    an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him
    to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch.  Lord
    Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected
    to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled
    gables?

    In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms
    appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear
    laughing in his face.  He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing
    reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for
    the immense service to be rendered.

    "I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he. "Put me in possession
    of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the
    Seven Gables is your own!"

    According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the
    above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the
    presence of witnesses.  Others say that Matthew Maule was contented
    with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his
    honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon.
    The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank
    together, in confirmation of their bargain.  During the whole preceding
    discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's portrait seems
    to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without
    effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he
    thought he beheld his grandfather frown.

    "This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain
    already," he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
    "On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate
    vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear
    transportation."

    "My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he
    pleases," replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr.
    Pyncheon's ambitious projects.  "But first, sir, if you desire tidings
    of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with
    your fair daughter Alice."

    "You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at
    last, there was anger mixed up with his pride.  "What can my daughter
    have to do with a business like this?"

    Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of
    the Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool
    proposition to surrender his house.  There was, at least, an assignable
    motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever
    for the last.  Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the
    young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a
    mysterious kind of explanation,--which made the matter considerably
    darker than it looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the
    requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and
    virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice.  Not to encumber our
    story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or
    fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called.  He
    well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation
    that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since
    Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had
    heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier
    melancholy of her accompanying voice.

    So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared.  A portrait of this young
    lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
    is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
    Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
    any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
    the high character of beauty in the countenance.  If ever there was a
    lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain
    gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon.  Yet
    there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
    tender capabilities.  For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
    generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
    content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
    foot upon his heart.  All that he would have required was simply the
    acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
    the same elements as she.

    As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
    standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
    breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
    end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's
    calling as Mr. Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's
    aristocratic pretensions.  A glow of artistic approval brightened over
    Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with admiration--which she made
    no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and
    energy of Maule's figure.  But that admiring glance (which most other
            men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through
            life) the carpenter never forgave.  It must have been the devil himself
    that made Maule so subtile in his preception.

    "Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he,
    setting his teeth.  "She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
    the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!"

    "My father, you sent for me," said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
    voice.  "But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
    again.  You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
    which you try to bring back sunny recollections."

    "Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule.  "My
    business with your father is over.  With yourself, it is now to begin!"

    Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.

    "Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
    "This young man--his name is Matthew Maule--professes, so far as I can
    understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
    paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth.  The
    importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
    no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it.  You will
    therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
    inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
    far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view.  As I
    shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
    deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of
    course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
    immediately be broken off."

    "Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
    deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no
    doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his
    all-sufficient protection."

    "I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
    at hand," said Alice with maidenly dignity.  "Neither do I conceive
    that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from
    whomsoever, or in any circumstances!"

    Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
    terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?

    "Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a
    chair,--gracefully enough, for a craftsman, "will it please you only to
    sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor
            carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"

    Alice complied, She was very proud.  Setting aside all advantages of
    rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power--combined of
    beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
    womanhood--that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
    treachery within.  She instinctively knew, it may be, that some
    sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor
    would she decline the contest.  So Alice put woman's might against
    man's might; a match not often equal on the part of woman.

    Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
    contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
    sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
    would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's
    bewildering depths.  But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
    that moment than the blank wall against which it hung.  His mind was
    haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
    mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
    grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors.  Mr. Pyncheon's
    long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
    fashion,--courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,--had done much
    towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
    New England birth at that early period could entirely escape.  But, on
    the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather
    to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
    for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
    to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
    subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house?  Might not
    this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?

    Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the
    looking-glass.  At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
    air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
    ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.

    "Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward.  "I forbid
    your proceeding further!"

    "Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice,
    without changing her position.  "His efforts, I assure you, will prove
    very harmless."

    Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude.  It was then his
    daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
    be fully tried.  Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge
    it.  And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he
    desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful
    Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might
    wed an English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New
    England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father
    almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devil's power were needed
    to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him.
    Alice's own purity would be her safeguard.

    With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
    half-uttered exclamation from his daughter.  It was very faint and low;
    so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
    and too undefined a purport to be intelligible.  Yet it was a call for
    help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
    whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in
    the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.

    After a further interval, Maule spoke.

    "Behold your daughter," said he.

    Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward.  The carpenter was standing erect in
    front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
    an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
    defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
    the infinite.  Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
    long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.

    "There she is!" said the carpenter.  "Speak to her!"

    "Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon.  "My own Alice!"

    She did not stir.

    "Louder!" said Maule, smiling.

    "Alice! Awake!" cried her father.  "It troubles me to see you thus!
    Awake!"

    He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
    ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord.  But the sound
    evidently reached her not.  It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
    dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
    the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.

    "Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
    My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
    might help you!"

    Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
    startled emotion.  He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
    kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it.  Then, in a gust of anger
    at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
    the next moment, it affrighted him to remember.  He withdrew his
    encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
    wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
    attempts to arouse her.  Maule having shifted his position, her face
    was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
    of her very slumber to his guidance.

    Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
    shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
    gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
    flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
    terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.

    "Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
    "You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter.  Give her
    back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
    grandfather's footsteps!"

    "Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
    "Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
    lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
    daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
    your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep.  Now let Matthew
    Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
    since."

    He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
    acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
    a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air.  He beckoned with
    his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
    tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
    him.  He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
    seat.

    "She is mine!" said Matthew Maule.  "Mine, by the right of the
    strongest spirit!"

    In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
    occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if
            so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
    document.  It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
    Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
    himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world.  He succeeded,
    accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
    remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
    valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth.  During
    her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
    spiritualized perception.  One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking
    gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
    but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
    aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
    broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
    life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
    woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule
    sticking out of his side pocket.  These three visionary characters
    possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document.  One of them, in
    truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless his
    gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
    keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
    disburdening himself of the trust.  Finally, when he showed a purpose
    of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own
    sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and
    pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith--whether that he were
    choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue--there was
    a fresh flow of blood upon his band.  Upon this, the two meanly dressed
    figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and
    pointed their fingers at the stain.

    At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.

    "It will never be allowed," said he.  "The custody of this secret, that
    would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's
    retribution.  He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
    And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
    inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
    awhile from the Colonel's posterity."

    Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could
    make only a gurgling murmur in his throat.  The carpenter smiled.

    "Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he
    jeeringly.

    "Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?"
    cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way.  "Give me
    back my daughter.  Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"

    "Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule.  "Why, she is fairly mine!
    Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
    her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
    occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter."

    He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
    of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
    strange trance.  She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
    visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
    and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
    an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
    up the chimney.  On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
    somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
    peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that stirred the native pride
    of the fair Alice.   So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
    title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
    subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
    eye upon that parchment.

    But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice!  A
    power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden
    soul.  A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque
    and fantastic bidding.  Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor
    child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead
    of acres.  And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's
    slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
    binds its chain around the body.  Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
    had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
    be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately
    guests, or worshipping at church,--whatever her place or occupation,
    her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to
    Maule.  "Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say;
    or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word.  And, even were it
    prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
    "Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
    quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
    bonfire.  "Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like
    measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
    hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
    It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
    with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
    sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
    upon her.  Thus all the dignity of life was lost.  She felt herself too
    much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!

    One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
            self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
    beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
    white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
    dwelling of a laboring-man.  There was laughter and good cheer within;
    for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and
    had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride.  And so she
    did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
    sleep.  Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
    sadness,--she kissed Maule's wife, and went her way.  It was an
    inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain
    into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through
    and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks.  The next day a cold;
    soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat
    beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music!  Music in
    which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For
    Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was
    penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!

    The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice.  The kith and kin were
    there, and the whole respectability of the town besides.  But, last in
    the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
    have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that
    ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
    but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
    with--and she was dead!




HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner.  He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
        reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress.  It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter.  With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his.  Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
        he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing.  A veil was
        beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
        and live only in his thoughts and emotions.  His glance, as he fastened
        it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
        attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
        mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
        manifestation.  It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
        a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
        Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit:  he could establish an influence
        over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
        disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
        exercised over the ill-fated Alice.

        To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
        is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
        the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
        become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny.  Let us,
        therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
        of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
        daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
        individuality.  Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
        confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
        might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.

        He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.

        "You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
        half-sarcastically at her.  "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
        never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
        I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
        powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
        manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
        with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"

        "Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
        crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
        the verge of which it has rolled.  "No, no! I consider myself as having
        been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
        distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
        calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."

        By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
        the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
        time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
        brilliancy.  The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
        unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
        demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
        of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
        middle pathway.  These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
        change the character of the lingering daylight.  They softened and
        embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
        deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
        projecting story, and within the half-open door.  With the lapse of
        every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
        shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them.  The
        commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
        taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
        a charm of romance.  A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
        the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
        stirred them.  Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
        the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
        floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
        play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
        admitted or shut out the glimmer.

        So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
        the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
        moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
        Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
        heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
        nature.  The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
        fell.  It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
        early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
        youthful he still was.

        "It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
        beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
        as at this moment.  After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
        and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
        age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
        positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
        this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
        were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
        possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
        earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
        the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
        earliest roses that God ever made.  Moonlight, and the sentiment in
        man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
        reformers.  And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
        to be no better than moonshine!"

        "I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
        thoughtfully.  "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
        moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
        reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon.  I never cared
        much about moonlight before.  What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
        it, to-night?"

        "And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
        earnestly at the girl through the twilight.

        "Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
        have felt it so.  It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
        in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
        glimmering and dancing through a room.  Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
        half-melancholy laugh.  "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
        Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford.  I have grown a great deal
        older, in this little time.  Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
        exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
        spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
        but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it.  They are welcome,
        notwithstanding!"

        "You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
        possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause.  "Our first youth is of
        no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone.  But
        sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
        unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
        heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
        other grand festival in life, if any other such there be.  This
        bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
        shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
        regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
        to the soul's development.  In some cases, the two states come almost
        simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
        mysterious emotion."

        "I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.

        "No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
        which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
        Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
        think of this moonlight scene!"

        "It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
        crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
        Phoebe.  "I must go in.  Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
        will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
        her."

        But Holgrave detained her a little longer.

        "Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
        in a few days."

        "Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
        this as my present home.  I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
        a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends.  It is pleasant to
        live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
        the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."

        "You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
        "Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
        embodied in your person.  These blessings came along with you, and will
        vanish when you leave the threshold.  Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
        herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
        fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
        and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
        greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl.  Your poor cousin Clifford is another
        dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
        wrought a necromantic miracle.  I should not wonder if he were to
        crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
        him more, except a heap of dust.  Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
        what little flexibility she has.  They both exist by you."

        "I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely.  "But it
        is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
        have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
        sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at!  And let me tell you
        frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
        them well or ill."

        "Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
        antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
        shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful.  A kindly
        interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
        conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own.  It is
        not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
        hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
        to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
        dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread.  If
        permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
        satisfaction from it, go matters how they may.  There is a conviction
        within me that the end draws nigh.  But, though Providence sent you
        hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
        pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"

        "I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
        displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
        and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
        desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
        as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
        and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
        tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
        the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement.  I
        do not like this.  The play costs the performers too much, and the
        audience is too cold-hearted."

        "You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
        truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.

        "And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
        which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
        new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
        I will not leave them!"

        "Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
        to which the girl was constrained to yield her own.  "I am somewhat of
        a mystic, it must be confessed.  The tendency is in my blood, together
        with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
        Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft.  Believe me, if I were
        really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
        friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
        we part.  But I have no such knowledge."

        "You hold something back!" said Phoebe.

        "Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave.  "I can perceive,
        indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
        ruin he had so large a share.  His motives and intentions, however are
        a mystery to me.  He is a determined and relentless man, with the
        genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
        putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
        joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it.  But, so wealthy
        and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
        support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
        or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"

        "Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"

        "Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist.  "My mind has a
        twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own.  Moreover,
        it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
        and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
                murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
        help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
        catastrophe."

        "There!"  cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
        hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner.  "You puzzle me
        more than ever!"

        "Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand.  "Or, if
        not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me.  You, who love
        everybody else in the world!"

        "Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly.  "I do not mean to be angry a
        great while, and should be sorry to have you think so.   There has
        Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
        quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
        So, good-night, and good-by."

        On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
        straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
        other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford.  She was to take
        a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
        half a dozen miles of her country village.

        The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
        regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth.  She wondered how it
        came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
        old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
        associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
        remembrance than all which had gone before.  How had Hepzibah--grim,
        silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
        to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
        mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
        lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
        child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
        providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
        farewell, stood out prominently to her view.  Look where she would, lay
        her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
        as if a moist human heart were in it.

        She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
        regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
        age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
        pine forests and fresh clover-fields.  She called Chanticleer, his two
        wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
        from the breakfast-table.  These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
        spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
        where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
        croak.  Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
        promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.

        "Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
        you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
        should.  It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
        your native air.  There has been too much weight on your spirits.  The
        house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
        for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
        Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"

        "Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
        very little all the morning.  "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
        face!"

        Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
        leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
        he would.  It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
        had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties.  At
        any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
        yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
        the subject of its regard.  A moment before, she had known nothing
        which she would have sought to hide.  Now, as if some secret were
        hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
        perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
        gaze.  A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
        down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
        even her brow was all suffused with it.

        "It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile.  "When
        I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
        now you have deepened into beauty.  Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
        the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."

        Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
        twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
        brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
        about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
        with her handkerchief.  On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
        whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
        pages of our narrative.  She took from the window some specimen or
        other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
        inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
        it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way.  Old
        Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
        on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
        keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
        spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
        his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.

        "We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
        philosopher.  "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
        to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
        pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
                saying it), that's just what you've grown to me!  My years have been a
        great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
        somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
        and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
        Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
        these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."

        "Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.

        "And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
        yonder," continued her companion.  "They can never do without you,
        now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
        been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
        comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
        pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
        and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
        you're going home by the railroad!  They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
        be sure to come back!"

        "I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
        her hand at the street-corner.  "But, I suppose, people never feel so
        much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may.  So
        I shall certainly come back!"

        Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
        the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
        with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
        graciously compared her.

 Clifford, who becomes fatigued easily, is now in the habit of retiring early, which is fortunate for Phoebe, who thus has a good deal of time to herself. Interestingly, she is changing; her eyes are now larger, darker, and deeper, and she seems to be less girlish. In the summer house, she is occasionally thrown into the company of Holgrave, who tells her about his varied career as a schoolmaster, salesman, country editor, peddler, sailor, communal farmer, hypnotist, and now as a photographer. He has retained his good conscience always, but he seems to obey strange rules. He is calm, cool, and more intellectual than emotional. He asks Phoebe about Clifford and seems surprised that she does not wish to try fathoming the man's nature. Holgrave rants about the dead weight of the past, says that houses should last only twenty years, and he mentions Maule's curse, which he says is very real. He fancies himself to be quite a thinker, but one might well wonder whether he himself will ever amount to anything. He tells Phoebe that he is a published author, and he begins to read to her a story that he has written about Alice Pyncheon. Holgrave's story relates that thirty-seven years after the house was built, the owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, grandson of the old Colonel, summoned the carpenter Matthew Maule, the only son of Thomas Maule, who built the Pyncheon mansion, to ask him about the missing documents, the deeds to "the lands eastward." Matthew took offense at Gervayse's European manners, and so, for revenge against the Pyncheons in general, he hypnotized the proud, beautiful, and pure Alice Pyncheon. Immediately thereafter, Alice described her vision of the old wizard Maule and his carpenter son as they tried to prevent blood-soaked old Colonel Pyncheon from releasing a parchment document to his heirs. Later, Alice, still a mesmerized "slave," kissed Matthew's bride, then caught cold, and died. Her sudden death wounded the carpenter's grandson; he gnashed his teeth -- he had sought only to humble Alice, not destroy her. Phoebe is half-hypnotized by the exciting story of Alice, and Holgrave admirably resists a terrible temptation to say something to Phoebe to make her his slave forever. In the darkening garden, the two young people talk of Holgrave's unusual happiness here, and of Phoebe's feelings of maturity because of her help to Clifford and Hepzibab; she has given them some of her "sunshine" and the presence of her youth, a quality which swiftly passes. Phoebe explains that she must go home again, for a few days, but she says that she will be back soon. Holgrave says that he enjoys watching the drama of two centuries seemingly drawing to a close. Phoebe calls him heartless, but he explains that he has only a mystical feeling, that he really knows nothing of consequence concerning the old Pyncheon house. Two mornings later, Phoebe takes a train bound for home. Hepzibah notes Phoebe's growing sadness. Clifford, however, calls her "a bud now blooming"; Uncle Venner urges her to return quickly, since otherwise he may be at the workhouse, and he calls her an angel who is essential to the well-being of her old cousins.

