Chapter: TRULY was there something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was quite as
probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty, developed by
sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and
thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in
what are called happier circumstances.  Through dreary years Hepzibah
had looked forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any
confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her
brightest possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself.  In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but
the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so
loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have been,--and to whom
she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly,
    at every instant, and throughout life.  And here, in his late decline,
    the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and
    was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of
    his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally
    alive.   She had responded to the call.  She had come forward,--our
    poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and
    the sad perversity of her scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with
    affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much!
    There could be few more tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a
    smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!--few sights with
    truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon.

    How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm
    love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no
    torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without!  Her little
    efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were!

    Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a
    bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading
    in their day.  There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in
    it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
    all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished
    brilliancy inside.  They had no success with Clifford.  These, and all
    such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of
    a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for
    every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to
    retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate
    of modes and manners.  Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to
    read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a
    contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve
    Clifford and herself for this one day.  But the Happy Valley had a
    cloud over it.  Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
    sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to
    the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense
    of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without
    harvesting its profit.  His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had,
    in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak,
    which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as
    sin.  In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying
    each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
    melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is
    conveyed in its slightest accent.  The effect is as if the voice had
    been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more moderate simile,--this
    miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is
    like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are
    strung, and whence they take their hue.  Such voices have put on
    mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with
    them!

    Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah
    searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime.
    At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
    It was a moment of great peril; for,--despite the traditionary awe that
    had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which
    spiritual fingers were said to play on it,--the devoted sister had
    solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and
    accompanying the performance with her voice.  Poor Clifford! Poor
    Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable
    together.  By some good agency,--possibly, by the unrecognized
    interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,--the threatening
    calamity was averted.

    But the worst of all--the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to
    endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for
    her appearance.  Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh
    with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her
    dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which
    had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,--such being the poor
    gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although
    the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful
    was fain to turn away his eyes.  There was no help for it.  It would be
    the latest impulse to die within him.  In his last extremity, the
    expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would
    doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her
    lavished love, and close his eyes,--but not so much to die, as to be
    constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took
    counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons
    on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was
    withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than
    fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.

    To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
    uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
    ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament.  She was a grief
    to Clifford, and she knew it.  In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
    turned to Phoebe.  No grovelling jealousy was in her heart.  Had it
    pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
    personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
    her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
    and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies.  This could not be.
    She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
    girl's hands.  The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
    but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
    better for that same simplicity.

    By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
    be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
    her two forlorn companions.  The grime and sordidness of the House of
    the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
    the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
    its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
    the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
    below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
    as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
    brush it all away.  The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
    lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
    had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
    long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
    scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
    one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart.  There was no
    morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
    very locality to ripen it into incurable disease.  But now her spirit
    resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
    Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
    various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
    folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there.  As
    every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
    did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
    they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
    intermixture with them.  Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
    impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
    offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
    moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
    robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
    Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother.  This facile
    adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
    preservative.

    A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom
    regarded with due honor.  Its spiritual force, however, may be
    partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for
    herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the
    mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a
    character of so much more mass than her own.   For the gaunt, bony
    frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of
    Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral
    weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.

    To the guest,--to Hepzibah's brother,--or Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe
    now began to call him,--she was especially necessary. Not that he could
    ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very
    definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a
    long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the
    room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his
    movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his
    head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of
    ill-humor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him.  Phoebe's
    presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was
    usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play
    of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,
    any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its
    flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that
    you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or
    what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a
    bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the
    Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long
    as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house.
    Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones
    came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the
    shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward
    from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,
    with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a
    little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more
    remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low
    footstool at his knee.

    It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe
    oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety.  But the young and
    happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent
    shadow.  The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came
    sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow
    so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that one's heart felt
    all the lighter for having wept at it.  Broad mirth, in the sacred
    presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently
    with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
    and her brother's life.  Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
    chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
    was singing them.

    Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
    capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
    all quarters his nature must originally have been.  He grew youthful
    while she sat by him.  A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
    utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
    seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
    nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
    illuminate his face.  It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
    him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
    exquisite and happy spirit.  That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
    their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
    so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
    the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
    vanished.  An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
    some shadow of what he was meant to be.  Anon, as age came stealing,
    like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
    to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
    should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
    tempered to his qualities.  There seemed no necessity for his having
    drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
    breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air.  The
    same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
    tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
    as lenient as it may.

    Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
    character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell.  Nor was it
    necessary.  The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
    faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
    them all.  Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
    Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
    so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did.  For Clifford, however, the
    reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
    were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed.  Beauty, it is
    true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
    Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
    and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
    beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
    guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
    her lack of beauty.  But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
    least--was ever made than Phoebe.  And, therefore, to this man,--whose
    whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
    both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
    images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
    been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
    ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
    was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
    Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
    things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
    be led back.  They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
    or in a dungeon.  Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
    very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
    beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
    it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
    hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
    one:  and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
    might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
    chain of human nature.  The world was no longer a delusion.

    By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
    explanation of an often-suggested mystery.  Why are poets so apt to
    choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
    qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
    as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit?  Because,
    probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
    intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

    There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
    this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
    waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers.  On
    Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
    liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed
    the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late.  He knew
    it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual
    decay.  Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not
    less chaste than if she had been his daughter.  He was a man, it is
    true, and recognized her as a woman.  She was his only representative
    of womankind.  He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained
    to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal
    development of her bosom.   All her little womanly ways, budding out of
    her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and
    sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of
    pleasure.  At such moments,--for the effect was seldom more than
    momentary,--the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just
    as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers
    sweep across it.  But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a
    sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual.  He
    read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as
    if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his
    bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,
    to warble through the house.  She was not an actual fact for him, but
    the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home
    to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had
    almost the comfort of reality.

    But we strive in vain to put the idea into words.  No adequate
    expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us
    is attainable.  This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so
    miserably failing to be happy,--his tendencies so hideously thwarted,
    that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character,
    never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
    imbecile,--this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in
    a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last
    mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor.  There, as he lay
    more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly
    rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up
    reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid
    which he should have had his home.  With his native susceptibility of
    happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his
    soul, and expires!

    And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl's was not one of those
    natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in
    human character.  The path which would best have suited her was the
    well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most
    have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn.  The mystery
    which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an
    annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have
    found in it.  Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into
    play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much,
    even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of
    a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
    She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,
    and seemed to have received so little.  With a ready tact, the result
    of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good
    for him, and did it.  Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience
    she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the
    incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole
    conduct.  The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more
    darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,
    mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;
they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in
infinite repetition.  But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of
purer air.  She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,--for
wildness was no trait of hers,--but with the perfume of garden-roses,
         pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have
         consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from
         century to century.  Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with
         Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.

         Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in
         consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her.  She grew more
         thoughtful than heretofore.  Looking aside at Clifford's face, and
         seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost
         quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life.  Was he
         always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?--this veil,
         under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and
         through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,--or was its
         gray texture woven of some dark calamity?  Phoebe loved no riddles, and
         would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
         Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on
         Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together
         with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,
         had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
         Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin
         Clifford too well--or fancied so--ever to shudder at the touch of his
         thin, delicate fingers.

         Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the
         routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity
         in the old house of our narrative.  In the morning, very shortly after
         breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor,
         unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of
         slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well
         towards noonday.  These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
         gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of
         the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and
         evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the
         multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.
         Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,--a long stocking of gray
         yarn, for her brother's winter wear,--and with a sigh, and a scowl of
         affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness
         on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter.  It was now the
         young girl's turn to be the nurse,--the guardian, the playmate,--or
         whatever is the fitter phrase,--of the gray-haired man.




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Since Clifford dislikes Hepzibah's ugliness, rustiness, and scowl, she soon quits reading to him and playing the harpsichord for him, and she sadly and reluctantly resigns to Phoebe the task of pleasing him. This pretty young girl, therefore, who is really without true intellectual depth, sings appropriately sad songs to him, yet she also feeds his hunger for beauty. Phoebe is like a daughter to Clifford, and yet he is keenly aware of her virginal bloom. Gradually, she grows pensive and curious, as she naturally would about the cause of his melancholy. Soon a routine is established: While Clifford naps after breakfast, Hepzibah watches him and Phoebe tends the shop; later, the girl entertains him while his sister turns to business. Time passes. In the garden is an old summer house, which Holgrave and Uncle Venner are repairing. In it, Phoebe reads to Clifford, who prefers poetry to romantic fiction. There are also murmuring bees there, red-blossomed beans, and hummingbirds to delight Clifford. Hepzibah watches him with tears in her nearsighted eyes. When a hen produces a diminutive egg, she seizes it for his breakfast; their rooster and the hens make up a little rivulet of life for them. Clifford is forever frightened by a "dark face" which he seems to see amid the mosaic-work of pebbles at the bottom of the well. Then the omen disappears. After church on Sunday, the family group often gathers in the old arbor. Clifford enjoys the company of philosophical old Venner, and he hints that he has some mysterious plans for the old man. Holgrave, looking sinister but still admired by Hepzibah for his pleasant manner, smilingly accuses Venner of believing that a community Utopia is possible. Clifford seems happy in the sunlight, yet at twilight, he weeps for a lost happiness. Very simply, he enjoys, most of all, watching the sweeping tide of humanity passing beneath a favorite arched window and balcony of the house. Children, vehicles, peddlers, scissors-grinders, and parades -- he is attracted by the sounds of them all. Once he seems so entranced that he seems about to jump from the balcony into the midst of a noisy political procession, but he restrains himself. He says that he wants to attend church. Phoebe has gone on ahead, so he and Hepzibah dress and emerge from their dark door -- only to stop, realizing, that it is too late, that they are "ghosts." Once, some time ago, Clifford remembers blowing soap-bubbles into the street below the arched window; Judge Pyncheon came by, frowned when a little bubble burst on his nose, looked up at his cringing cousin and said sarcastically: "What? Still blowing soap-bubbles?" Clifford was panic-stricken.

