Chapter: IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon--we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor
lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of
midsummer--but, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and
began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person.
Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a
maiden lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at
the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some
of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint
as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they
could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself.
The Old Maid was alone in the old house.  Alone, except for a certain
respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line,
            who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote
            gable,--quite a house by itself, indeed,--with locks, bolts, and oaken
            bars on all the intervening doors.  Inaudible, consequently, were poor
            Miss Hepzibah's gusty sighs.  Inaudible the creaking joints of her
            stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside.  And inaudible, too,
            by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending love and pity in the
            farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer--now whispered, now a
            groan, now a struggling silence--wherewith she besought the Divine
            assistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day of more than
            ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century
            gone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business
            of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures.  Not with
            such fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold,
            sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable
            yesterdays.

            The maiden lady's devotions are concluded.  Will she now issue forth
            over the threshold of our story?  Not yet, by many moments.  First,
            every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, with
            difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all must
            close again, with the same fidgety reluctance.  There is a rustling of
            stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro
            across the chamber.  We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a
            step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her
            appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingy-framed
            toilet-glass, that hangs above her table.  Truly! well, indeed! who
            would have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the
            matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goes
            abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have
            done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes another
            way?

            Now she is almost ready.  Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is
            given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,--heightened and
            rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,--to the
            strong passion of her life.  We heard the turning of a key in a small
            lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably
            looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect style,
            and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil.  It was
            once our good fortune to see this picture.  It is a likeness of a young
            man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of
            which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,
            tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much
            capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion.  Of the
            possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except
            that he would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it.
            Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a
            lover--poor thing, how could she?--nor ever knew, by her own
            experience, what love technically means.  And yet, her undying faith
            and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the
            original of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart
            to feed upon.

            She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before
            the toilet-glass.  There are tears to be wiped off.  A few more
            footsteps to and fro; and here, at last,--with another pitiful sigh,
            like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of
            which has accidentally been set, ajar--here comes Miss Hepzibah
            Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall
            figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her
            way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.

            The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending
            nearer and nearer to its verge.  A few clouds, floating high upward,
            caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on
            the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House
            of the Seven Gables, which--many such sunrises as it had
            witnessed--looked cheerfully at the present one.  The reflected
            radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement
            of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs.  It
            was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with
            dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with pictured
            tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran the
            funnel of a modern stove.  There was a carpet on the floor, originally
            of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its
            once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable
            hue.  In the way of furniture, there were two tables:  one, constructed
            with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede;
            the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so
            apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time
            the ancient tea-table had stood upon them.  Half a dozen chairs stood
            about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for
            the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to
            sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society
            to which they could have been adapted.  One exception there was,
            however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved
            elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by
            its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic
            curves which abound in a modern chair.

            As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if such
            they may be called.  One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the
            eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
            draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and
            wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the
            region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most
            fantastically awry.  The other adornment was the portrait of old
            Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features
            of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and
            a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other
            uplifting an iron sword-hilt.  The latter object, being more
            successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater
            prominence than the sacred volume.  Face to face with this picture, on
            entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;
            regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow,
            which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been
            interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will.  But it was
            no such thing.  She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,
            of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be
            susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her
            near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision
            as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.

            We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor
            Hepzibah's brow.  Her scowl,--as the world, or such part of it as
            sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly
            persisted in calling it,--her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill
            office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor
            does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
            looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its
            ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as
            unjustly as the world did.  "How miserably cross I look!" she must
            often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself
            so, by a sense of inevitable doom.  But her heart never frowned.  It
            was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and
            palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was
            growing so perversely stern, and even fierce.  Nor had Hepzibah ever
            any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her
            affections.

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

            It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable
            fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had
            fitted up a shop.  Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and
            fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner
            arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust of
            ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled
            an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed.  It
            treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still
            lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the
            hereditary pride which had here been put to shame.  Such had been the
            state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood,
            when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken
            precincts.  So it had remained, until within a few days past.

            But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
            public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior.  The
            rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral
            succession of spiders their life's labor to spin and weave, had been
            carefully brushed away from the ceiling.  The counter, shelves, and
            floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh
            blue sand.  The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid
            discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!
            had eaten through and through their substance.  Neither was the little
            old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods.  A curious eye,
            privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the
            counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and
            half ditto,--one containing flour, another apples, and a third,
            perhaps, Indian meal.  There was likewise a square box of pine-wood,
            full of soap in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were
            tallow candles, ten to the pound.  A small stock of brown sugar, some
            white beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price,
            and such as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of
            the merchandise.  It might have been taken for a ghostly or
            phantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbily
            provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description
            and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day.  For
            instance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of
            Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone
            foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly
            done up in white paper.  Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his
            world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.  A party of leaden dragoons were
            galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern
            cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to
            the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our
            own fashions than those of a hundred years ago.  Another phenomenon,
            still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which,
            in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their
            instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.

            In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
            incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
            of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
            the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
            customers.  Who could this bold adventurer be?  And, of all places in
            the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
            of his commercial speculations?

            We return to the elderly maiden.  She at length withdrew her eyes from
            the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,
            her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across the
            room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women.  Passing
            through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
            with the shop, just now so elaborately described.  Owing to the
            projection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow of
            the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the
            gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.
            Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
            threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as
            if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into
            the shop.  The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the
            movement, were really quite startling.

            Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busy
            herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
            wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window.  In the aspect of this
            dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
            character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
            of her employment.  It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
            a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
            vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
            perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
            tempt little boys into her premises!  Yet such is undoubtedly her
            object.  Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
            with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
            dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
            elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread.  There,
            again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different
            ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
            difficult obscurity that it can find.  Heaven help our poor old
            Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!
            As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in
            quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more
            inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must
            needs turn aside and laugh at her.  For here,--and if we fail to
            impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of
            the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that
            occur in ordinary life.  It was the final throe of what called itself
            old gentility.  A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the
            shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was
            that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
            bread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain
            to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank.  Poverty, treading
            closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last.  She
            must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss
            Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
            patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

            In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
            life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.  The tragedy is enacted
            with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
            and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
            noble sinks below his order.  More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
            grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
            spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
            with them.  And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
            introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
            for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate.  Let us
            behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady--two hundred years old,
            on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,--with her
            antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions,
            and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the
            eastward, no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,--born, too,
            in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
            where she has spent all her days,--reduced.  Now, in that very house,
            to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop.

            This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of
            women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate
            recluse.  With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of
            hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress;
            although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the
            most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework.  A school for little
            children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had
            begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a
            view to prepare herself for the office of instructress.  But the love
            of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now
            torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the
            neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could
            tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them.  Besides, in our day,
            the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer
            taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter.  A modern child could
            teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.
            So--with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last coming
            into sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept
            aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone
            against the cavern door of her hermitage--the poor thing bethought
            herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till.
            She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not
            yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision.  Her humble
            preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to
            be commenced.  Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable
            singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might
            point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in
            houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may
            be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an
            image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.

            It was overpoweringly ridiculous,--we must honestly confess it,--the
            deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the
            public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she
            conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the
            elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank
            arm, she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a jew's-harp, or whatever the
            small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished
            back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse
            of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to
            minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied
            divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential
            and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no
            such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come
            forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like
            other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the
            gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world's
            astonished gaze at once.

            The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed.  The sunshine
            might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from
            the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the
            boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more
            distinctly than heretofore.  The town appeared to be waking up.   A
            baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the
            latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its
            dissonant bells.  A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans
            from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman's conch shell was
            heard far off, around the corner.  None of these tokens escaped
            Hepzibah's notice.  The moment had arrived.  To delay longer would be
            only to lengthen out her misery.  Nothing remained, except to take down
            the bar from the shop-door, leaving the entrance free--more than
            free--welcome, as if all were household friends--to every passer-by,
            whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window.  This
            last act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what smote
            upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter.  Then--as if the
            only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a
            flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap--she
            fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral
            elbow-chair, and wept.

            Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
            endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,
            in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the
            mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos
            which life anywhere supplies to him.  What tragic dignity, for example,
            can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history
            of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most
            prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce--not a young and
            lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered
            by affliction--but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a
            long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her
            head! Her visage is not even ugly.  It is redeemed from insignificance
            only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl.
            And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years
            of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by
            setting up a shop in a small way.  Nevertheless, if we look through all
            the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of
            something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.
            Life is made up of marble and mud.  And, without all the deeper trust
            in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect
            the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
            countenance of fate.  What is called poetic insight is the gift of
            discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty
            and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.

 The Little Shop-Window: Hepzibah Pyncheon was an old maid living alone in the old house, with the exception of a respectable and orderly young artist who had been a lodger in a remote gable. Miss Hepzibah had dwelt in strict seclusion for nearly twenty-five years. She opens a secret drawer, looking for a certain miniature that represents the face of a young man, and sheds tears at its sight, then goes into a room of the house with a map of the Pyncheon territory and a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. Miss Hepzibah pauses at the picture, regarding it with a singular scowl; this scowl had established her as an ill-tempered old maid, contrary to her actual character: sensitive, tender and weak. Hepzibah then goes into the shop that had been closed off and was now adorned with cobwebs. She nervously busies herself with arranging some playthings and wares in the shop window, appearing alternately sympathetic and laughable. Poverty had forced her to open this shop up so that she may support herself.

