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.
MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous.  She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell.  The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an
enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience.
This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,--being fastened over the
shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring,
    and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any
    customer should cross the threshold.  Its ugly and spiteful little din
    (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's periwigged
     predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body
    in responsive and tumultuous vibration.  The crisis was upon her! Her
    first customer was at the door!

    Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the
    shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
    portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with
    a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
    small wares for a copper recompense.  Any ordinary customer, indeed,
    would have turned his back and fled.  And yet there was nothing fierce
    in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
    bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
    woman.  She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself
    were done with them, and in her quiet grave.

    The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway.  Coming freshly,
    as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some
    of its cheery influences into the shop along with him.  It was a
    slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with
    rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a
    springy alacrity and vigor.  These qualities were not only perceptible,
    physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost
    immediately in his character.  A brown beard, not too silken in its
    texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he
    wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, high-featured countenance
    looked all the better for these natural ornaments.  As for his dress,
    it was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary
    material, thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of
    the finest braid.  Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment.
    He was chiefly marked as a gentleman--if such, indeed, he made any
    claim to be--by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean
    linen.

    He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having
    heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.

    "So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist,--for it was that
    sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,--"I am glad to see
    that you have not shrunk from your good purpose.  I merely look in to
    offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in
    your preparations."

    People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
    world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only
    the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest
    expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy.  So it proved
    with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's smile,--looking
    so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,--and heard his kindly tone,
    she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob.

    "Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I never can
    go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead, and in the
    old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my
    mother, and my sister!  Yes, and with my brother, who had far better
    find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,--and I am too
    old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"

    "Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these
    feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
    the midst of your enterprise.  They are unavoidable at this moment,
    standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
    peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
    unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book.  I find nothing
    so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance
    the instant one actually grapples with it.  So it will be with what you
    think so terrible."

    "But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah piteously.  "I was going to say, a
    lady,--but I consider that as past."

    "Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange gleam
    of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner.
    "Let it go! You are the better without it.  I speak frankly, my dear
    Miss Pyncheon!--for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of the
    fortunate days of your life.  It ends an epoch and begins one.
    Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins as
    you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the
    world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
    another.  Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and
    natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great
    or small--to the united struggle of mankind.  This is success,--all the
    success that anybody meets with!"

    "It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
    these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly
    offended dignity.  "You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I
    suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your
    fortune.  But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter
    in what narrowness of means, always a lady."

    "But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one," said
    Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect
    me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I
    deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These
    names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the
    world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those
    entitled to bear them. In the present--and still more in the future
    condition of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!"

    "These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head.
    "I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."

    "We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with a
    friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to feel
    whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady.  Do you really
    think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more
    heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it
    to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt
    whether an old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you told me once,
    would have had much weight with Providence against them."

    "Ah!--no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the
    sombre dignity of an inherited curse.  "If old Maule's ghost, or a
    descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
    call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes.  But I thank you for your
    kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper."

    "Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your
    first customer.  I am about taking a walk to the seashore, before going
    to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out
    human features through its agency.  A few of those biscuits, dipt in
    sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast.  What is the price
    of half a dozen?"

    "Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner of
    antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
    She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation.  "A
    Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers' roof, receive
    money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!"

    Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits
    not quite so much depressed.  Soon, however, they had subsided nearly
    to their former dead level.  With a beating heart, she listened to the
    footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the
    street.  Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or
    neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys
    and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window.  She was doubly
    tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and
    unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because
    the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window
    was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
    might have been.  It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her
    shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or
    substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked.  So
    she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
    spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
    juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought
    all the seeming mischief.

    Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
    laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be.  After some
    slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
    shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.

    "See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to be
    looking up in Pyncheon Street!"

    "Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other.  "In
    the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have
    thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"

    "Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend.  "I don't
    call it a very good stand.  There's another shop just round the corner."

    "Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if
    the very idea were impossible to be conceived.  "Not a bit of it! Why,
    her face--I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year--her face
    is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a
    mind to trade with her.  People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls
    dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper."

    "Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man.  "These
    sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well
    what they are about.  But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much.
    This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds
    of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor.  I know it, to my cost! My wife
    kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."

    "Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his
    head,--"poor business."

    For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
    been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
    what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation.
    The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
    seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
    self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it.  She
    was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
    setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to
    herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
    the nearest representatives.  A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
    laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
    They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
    degradation.  Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
    sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
    into a grave.  The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
    and failed! How could the born lady--the recluse of half a lifetime,
    utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,--how could she
    ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed
    New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
    presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
    hallucination.

    Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
    unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
    great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers.  So many and so
    magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
    with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
    vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
    been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
    establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
    of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
    multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
    and measuring out the goods.  On the other, the dusky old House of the
    Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting
    story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the
    counter, scowling at the world as it went by!  This mighty contrast
    thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which
    she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence.  Success?
    Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just
    as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the
    sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a
    hand so much as try the door!

    But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if
    it were bewitched.  The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be attached
    to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks,
    in unison with the sound.  The door was thrust open, although no human
    form was perceptible on the other side of the half-window.  Hepzibah,
    nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very
    much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit, and were afraid, yet
    resolved, to hazard the encounter.

    "Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally.  "Now is my hour of need!"

    The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges,
    being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became
    apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple.  He was clad rather shabbily
    (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his
     father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes
    somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his
    curly hair sticking through its crevices.  A book and a small slate,
    under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school.  He stared
    at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been
    likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude
    and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him.

    "Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little
    formidable,--"well, my child, what did you wish for?"

    "That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a
    cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his
    notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken
    foot."

    So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the
    shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.

    "No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push towards
    the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight
    of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to
    take the child's pocket-money in exchange for a bit of stale
    gingerbread.  "No matter for the cent.  You are welcome to Jim Crow."

    The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
    wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the
    man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises.  No sooner had he reached
    the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow's head was in
    his mouth.  As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was
    at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two
    about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small
    boys.  She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim
    Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and
    again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,
    disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,
    had made his exit.  The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
    as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.

    "What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; "did
    you come back to shut the door?"

    "No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
    put up; "I want that other Jim Crow."

    "Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
    recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any
    other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she
    partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"

    The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee, would
    have preferred the better bargain to the worse.  Looking somewhat
    chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and departed, sending
    the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one.  The new shop-keeper
    dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the
    till.  It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be
    washed away from her palm.  The little schoolboy, aided by the impish
    figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin.  The
    structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if
    his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion.  Now let
    Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall,
    and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire,
    and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral
    traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than
    with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn
    old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!

    Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
    ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
    calmness had come over her.  The anxiety and misgivings which had
    tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, ever since
    her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now vanished quite
    away.  She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with
    disturbance or affright.  Now and then, there came a thrill of almost
    youthful enjoyment.  It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
    atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
    So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know
    of!  The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now
    in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her
    hand to help herself.  The little circlet of the schoolboy's copper
    coin--dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which
    it had been doing here and there about the world--had proved a
    talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn
    next her heart.  It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same
    kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was
    indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the
    more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which,
    still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra
    spoonful in her infusion of black tea.

    Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however, without
    many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor.  As a
    general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than
    just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a
    reasonably full exertion of their powers.  In the case of our old
    gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the
    despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return.  It
    was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the
    sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,
    it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine.  But, always, the
    envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial
    azure.

    Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some
    cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to
    themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of
    very rich emolument to the till.  A little girl, sent by her mother to
    match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the
    near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running
    back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and,
    besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman,
    not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair,
    like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you
    at once recognize as worn to death by a brute--probably a drunken
    brute--of a husband, and at least nine children.  She wanted a few
    pounds of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman
    silently rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she
    had taken it.  Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much
    soiled, came in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile,
    with the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid
    atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an
    inflammable gas.  It was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this was the
    husband of the care-wrinkled woman.  He asked for a paper of tobacco;
    and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article, her
    brutal customer dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop,
    muttering some unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness
    of a curse.  Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally
    scowling in the face of Providence!

    No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
    ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
    obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
    Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
    spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with
    Hepzibah's nerves.  A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
    neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;
    and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave
    her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this
    very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke.

    "A cent-shop, and no yeast!" quoth she; "That will never do!  Who ever
    heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine
    will to-day.  You had better shut up shop at once."

    "Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"

    Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
    sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not
    rude, tone with which people addressed her.  They evidently considered
    themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors.  Now,
    Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there
    would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person,
    which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at
    least, a tacit recognition of it.  On the other hand, nothing tortured
    her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently
    expressed.  To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her
    responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,
    Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the
    suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any
    real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked
    wish to stare at her.  The vulgar creature was determined to see for
    herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after
    wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from
    the world, would cut behind a counter.  In this particular case,
    however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah's
    contortion of brow served her in good stead.

    "I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer, in
    describing the incident to one of her acquaintances.  "She's a real old
    vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but if you
    could only see the mischief in her eye!"

    On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman
    to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what
    she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon
    with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere
    of unquestionable superiority.  But, unfortunately, she had likewise to
    struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind:  a
    sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
    it had so recently been her pride to belong.  When a lady, in a
    delicate and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully
    swaying gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look
    at her beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust
    or floated in the air,--when such a vision happened to pass through
    this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with
    her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,--then
    again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
    vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.

    "For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility
    which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the
    rich,--"for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman
    live?  Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be
    kept white and delicate?"

    Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.

    "May God forgive me!" said she.

    Doubtless, God did forgive her.  But, taking the inward and outward
    history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to
    fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point
    of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her
    temporal welfare.




TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and
of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite
side of the white and dusty street.  On coming within the shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the
        perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial
interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables.
He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as
the house.  No better model need be sought, nor could have been found,
    of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
    magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even
    governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
    essential to the man.  Without appearing to differ, in any tangible
    way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity
    about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it
    could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material.  His
    gold-headed cane, too,--a serviceable staff, of dark polished
    wood,--had similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself,
    would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate
    representative of its master.  This character--which showed itself so
    strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which we seek to
    convey to the reader--went no deeper than his station, habits of life,
    and external circumstances.  One perceived him to be a personage of
    marked influence and authority; and, especially, you could feel just as
    certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account, or
    as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and,
    Midas-like, transmuting them to gold.

    In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man; at his
    present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare, his
    remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
    compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty.  He would
    have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any
    previous period of his life, although his look might grow positively
    harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas.  The artist would
    have found it desirable to study his face, and prove its capacity for
    varied expression; to darken it with a frown,--to kindle it up with a
    smile.

    While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House, both
    the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance.  His
    eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
    spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
    little arrangement of toys and commodities.  At first it seemed not to
    please him,--nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,--and yet, the
    very next moment, he smiled.  While the latter expression was yet on
    his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
    forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
    disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence.  He bowed,
    with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
    his way.

    "There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
    emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it
    back into her heart.  "What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
    please him? Ah! he is looking back!"

    The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,
    still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window.  In fact, he wheeled
    wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the
    shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah's
    first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the
    window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread.  What
    a grand appetite had this small urchin!--Two Jim Crows immediately
    after breakfast!--and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before
    dinner.  By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly
    gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.

    "Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey,"  muttered the maiden lady, as
    she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up
    and down the street,--"Take it as you like! You have seen my little
    shop-window.  Well!--what have you to say?--is not the Pyncheon House
    my own, while I'm alive?"

    After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she
    at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at it
    with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds
    with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the
    room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old
    Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
    picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the
    duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been
    growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her
    earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical
    outline and substance were darkening away from the beholder's eye, the
    bold, hard, and, at the same time, indirect character of the man seemed
    to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an effect may
    occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a
    look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of
            artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his
    own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once
    recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul.  In such
    cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits has
    wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the
    superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.

    While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye.  Her
    hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the
    original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do.
    But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled her--at
    least, she fancied so--to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
    the face which she had just seen in the street.

    "This is the very man!" murmured she to herself.  "Let Jaffrey Pyncheon
    smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a skull-cap,
    and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in
    the other,--then let Jaffrey smile as he might,--nobody would doubt
    that it was the old Pyncheon come again.  He has proved himself the
    very man to build up a new house!  Perhaps, too, to draw down a new
    curse!"

    Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
    time.  She had dwelt too much alone,--too long in the Pyncheon
    House,--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its
    timbers.  She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.

    By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted
    with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but
    yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect.
    Malbone's miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to
    Hepzibah's air-drawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful
    remembrance wrought together.  Soft, mildly, and cheerfully
    contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which
    the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs!
    Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The
    miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably
    thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and
    lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
    made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.

    "Yes," thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
    tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, "they
    persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!"

    But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
    distance,--so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of
    her reminiscences.  On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a
    humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years
    past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house.  He was
    an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and
    wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a
    half-decayed one, in the front of the upper jaw.  Well advanced as
    Hepzibah was, she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the
    neighborhood called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping
    a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement.  But
    still there was something tough and vigorous about him, that not only
    kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill a place which would
    else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world.  To go of
    errands with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he
    ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small household's foot or two of
    firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board
    for kindling-stuff; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground
    appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his
    labor at the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
    sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothes-line;
    such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed
    among at least a score of families.  Within that circle, he claimed the
    same sort of privilege, and probably felt as much warmth of interest,
    as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners.  Not that he laid
    claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went
    his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and
    overflowings of the dinner-pot, as food for a pig of his own.

    In his younger days--for, after all, there was a dim tradition that he
    had been, not young, but younger--Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as
    rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits.  In truth he had
    virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such
    success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
    part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged
    deficiency.  But now, in his extreme old age,--whether it were that his
    long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his
    decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring
    himself,--the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and
    really enjoyed the credit of it.  There was likewise, at times, a vein
    of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wall-flower of his
    mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have
    been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life.  Hepzibah
    had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had
    formerly been respectable.  It was a still better reason for awarding
    him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the
    most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,
    except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that
    overshadowed it.

    This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old
    blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him
    from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk.  As for his trousers,
    they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down
    strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure
    which his other garment entirely lacked.  His hat had relation to no
    other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.
    Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,
    but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of
    different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.

    "So, you have really begun trade," said he,--"really begun trade!
    Well, I'm glad to see it.  Young people should never live idle in the
    world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of
    them.  It has given me warning already; and in two or three years
    longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my
    farm.  That's yonder,--the great brick house, you know,--the workhouse,
    most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be
    idle and enjoy myself.  And I'm glad to see you beginning to do your
    work, Miss Hepzibah!"

    "Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt
    kindly towards the simple and talkative old man.  Had he been an old
    woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took
    in good part.  "It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak
    the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up."

    "Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!" answered the old man.  "You are a
    young woman yet.  Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now,
    it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the
    door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used
    to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street;
    for you had always a grave kind of way with you,--a grown-up air, when
    you were only the height of my knee.  It seems as if I saw you now; and
    your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his cocked
    hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping so grandly up
    the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used
    to put on grand airs.  In my young days, the great man of the town was
    commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady.
    Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels
    himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
    to them.  I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
    tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do
    believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!"

    "Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her
    tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!"

    "And so he has" replied Uncle Venner.  "And that's rather remarkable in
    a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the
    name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks.  There was no getting
    close to them.  But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to
    ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and
    tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It's for your
    credit to be doing something, but it's not for the Judge's credit to
    let you!"

    "We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner," said Hepzibah
    coldly.  "I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for
    myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's fault.  Neither will he deserve the
    blame," added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges of
    age and humble familiarity, "if I should, by and by, find it convenient
    to retire with you to your farm."

    "And it's no bad place, either, that farm of mine!" cried the old man
    cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the
    prospect.  "No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for
    them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.
    I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
    it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
    nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.
    Summer or winter, there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
    And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
    whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
    somebody as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
    natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
    Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use?  Upon my word,
    Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean
    to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse.  But
    you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never need go there! Something
    still better will turn up for you.  I'm sure of it!"

    Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
    friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
    considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
    if any, might be lurking there.  Individuals whose affairs have reached
    an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
    with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
    of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
    moderate expectation of good.  Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
    perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
    unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
    intervene in her favor.  For example, an uncle--who had sailed for
    India fifty years before, and never been heard of since--might yet
    return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and
    decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls
    and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable
    riches.  Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English
    branch of the family,--with which the elder stock, on this side of the
    Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
    centuries,--this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the
    ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her
    kindred at Pyncheon Hall.  But, for reasons the most imperative, she
    could not yield to his request.  It was more probable, therefore, that
    the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some
    past generation, and became a great planter there,--hearing of
    Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of
    character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New
    England blood,--would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with
    a hint of repeating the favor annually.  Or,--and, surely, anything so
    undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable
    anticipation,--the great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might
    finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of
    keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from
    its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own
    share of the ancestral territory.

    These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,
    aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual attempt at encouragement kindled
    a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
    brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas.  But
    either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,--as how should
    he?--or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might
    a more courageous man's.  Instead of pursuing any weightier topic,
    Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in
    her shop-keeping capacity.

    "Give no credit!"--these were some of his golden maxims,--"Never take
    paper-money.  Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the
    four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper
    tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit
    children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make
    your own ginger-beer!"

    And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
    pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and
    what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:--

    "Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you
    hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good,
    warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've
    scowled upon."

    To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and
    heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered
    leaf,--as he was,--before an autumnal gale.  Recovering himself,
    however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his
    ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.

    "When do you expect him home?" whispered he.

    "Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah, turning pale.

    "Ah!--You don't love to talk about it," said Uncle Venner.  "Well,
    well! we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town.  I
    remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!"

    During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even
    less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts.  She
    appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
    reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
    unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
    She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the
    shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague
    eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and
    thrusting aside--perversely, as most of them supposed--the identical
    thing they asked for.  There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
    thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in
    any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
    and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
    may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life.  It is like
    death, without death's quiet privilege,--its freedom from mortal care.
    Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty
    details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman.  As the
    animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
    the course of the afternoon.  Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
    small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors:  now
    stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to
    the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
    needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public
    detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her
    utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day's
    labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer
    almost destitute of coin.  After all her painful traffic, the whole
    proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable
    ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.

    At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
    reached its end.  Never before had she had such a sense of the
    intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of
    the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better
    wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and
    let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over one's prostrate
    body as they may! Hepzibah's final operation was with the little
    devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel.
    In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a
    handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else
    omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of
    natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
    the shop.  She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put
    up the oaken bar across the door.

    During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under the
    branches of the elm-tree.  Hepzibah's heart was in her mouth.  Remote
    and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that
    region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
    Was she to meet him now?

    Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the
    omnibus towards its entrance.   A gentleman alighted; but it was only
    to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
    such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
    little jump from the final one to the sidewalk.  She rewarded her
    cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
    his own face as he reentered the vehicle.  The girl then turned towards
    the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,--not
    the shop-door, but the antique portal,--the omnibus-man had carried a
    light trunk and a bandbox.  First giving a sharp rap of the old iron
    knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step, and
    departed.

    "Who can it be?" thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual
    organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable.  "The girl
    must have mistaken the house."  She stole softly into the hall, and,
    herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at
    the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for
    admittance into the gloomy old mansion.  It was a face to which almost
    any door would have opened of its own accord.

    The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and
    obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was
    widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her.  The
    sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of
    the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the
    time-worn framework of the door,--none of these things belonged to her
    sphere.  But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it
    may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so
    did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
    threshold.  It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
    open to admit her.   The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in
    her first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved
    back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.

    "Can it be Phoebe?" questioned she within herself.  "It must be little
    Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
    about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
    cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
    day's notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must
    have a night's lodging, I suppose; and to-morrow the child shall go
    back to her mother."

    Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
    Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
    part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
    relationship are still partially kept up.  In her own circle, it was
    regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
    without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning.  Yet, in
    consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
    actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe's
    projected visit.  This epistle, for three or four days past, had been
    in the pocket of the penny-postman, who, happening to have no other
    business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at
    the House of the Seven Gables.

    "No--she can stay only one night," said Hepzibah, unbolting the door.
    "If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!"

 Early one morning, Hepzibah, who according to the previous owner's will can live in the house as long as she wishes, arises, gazes at the miniature portrait of a delicate young man, and then goes into a paneled old room with a faded carpet, tables, a high-backed chair, and the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, to which she presents her habitual near-sighted scowl. Unable to sew or teach school, she must now earn her living here. With a deep sigh, the old spinster reluctantly opens the cent-shop, now filled with flour, apples, soap, candles, dried vegetables, candy, gingerbread men, lead soldiers, matches, and the like. The town stirs; the old spinster seems simultaneously ludicrous and pathetic. Her first customer is Holgrave, the daguerreotypist who rents a part of the vast old Pyncheon house. When Hepzibah breaks down and cries, he comforts her by telling her that she is now a heroic part of the great working public, and then he asks for some biscuits, which she gives him without allowing him to pay. Afterward, a boy, Ned Higgins, comes to get a Jim Crow cookie, for which she does not charge him; but when he returns for another, she demands his penny. It is done. She is now a tradeswoman. She feels a curious thrill -- almost a feeling of joy. But her day is mixed -- pessimistic and curious customers loiter, or else they enter to observe her. When a rich woman passes, Hepzibah is tempted to curse her, but then she repents and scowls instead. The day continues. Hepzibah's rich cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, walks by, well dressed but no longer handsome, with an unpleasant smile, and he looks disapprovingly at her shop but then smiles broadly when he sees her. Hepzibah notes that he resembles their Puritan ancestor's portrait hanging in the house's living room, which she now visits. She begins to think of her brother, Clifford, persecuted because of the soft traits in him that he inherited from their soft-hearted mother. Returning to her shop, she sees old Uncle Venner, a kindly fellow with a fund of wisdom who talks of his ultimate retirement to his "farm" -- in reality, the workhouse. He advises Hepzibah to smile at her customers, and then he cautiously asks when "he" is expected home. When Uncle Venner leaves, Hepzibah feels sad and confused; she gives wrong change, and she welcomes the end of her first commercial day, even though her profit amounts to only a few coppers. As she is locking the door of the cent-shop, Hepzibah notices an omnibus drawing up to the front of the house, and out steps a pretty young girl with a trunk. Hepzibah, peering from out of the darkness, recognizes the young lady as Phoebe, a kinsperson from the country, whose letter announcing her arrival has been overlooked in the postman's pocket for four or five days.

