University of Virginia Library

1. I.
THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY.

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

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected
me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not
merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive, also,
of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes
that have passed within. Were these to be worthily
recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest
and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable
unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic

arrangement. But the story would include a chain of
events extending over the better part of two centuries, and,
written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger
folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England
during a similar period. It consequently becomes
imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary
lore of which the old Pyncheon-house, otherwise known as
the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme. With
a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which
the foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse
at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent
east wind, — pointing, too, here and there, at some spot of
more verdant mossiness on its roof and walls, — we shall
commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very
remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection
with the long past — a reference to forgotten events and
personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost
or wholly obsolete — which, if adequately translated to the
reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material
goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. Hence,
too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded
truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ
which may and must produce good or evil fruit, in a far distant
time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary
crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably
sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may
darkly overshadow their posterity.

The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks,
was not the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely
the same spot of ground. Pyncheon-street formerly
bore the humbler appellation of Maule's-lane, from the
name of the original occupant of the soil, before whose cottage-door
it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft and

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

Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime
of witchcraft. He was one of the martyrs to that terrible
delusion, which should teach us, among its other morals, that
the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves
to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate
error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Clergymen, judges, statesmen, — the wisest, calmest, holiest
persons of their day, — stood in the inner circle round about
the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest
to confess themselves miserably deceived. If any one part
of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame than
another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which
they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various
ruin, it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like
Maule, should have trodden the martyr's path to the hill of
execution almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow-sufferers.
But, in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous
epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly
Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge
the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered,
that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with which
he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule. It
was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness
of personal enmity in his persecutor's conduct towards
him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for his
spoil. At the moment of execution — with the halter about
his neck, and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback,
grimly gazing at the scene — Maule had addressed him from
the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of which history, as well

as fireside tradition, has preserved the very words. “God,”
said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look,
at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, “God will
give him blood to drink!”

After the reputed wizard's death, his humble homestead
had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp.
When it was understood, however, that the colonel intended
to erect a family mansion — spacious, ponderously framed
of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations
of his posterity — over the spot first covered by the log-built
hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the
head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing
a doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as
a man of conscience and integrity, throughout the proceedings
which have been sketched, they, nevertheless, hinted
that he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave.
His home would include the home of the dead and buried
wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind
of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers
into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and
where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born.
The terror and ugliness of Maule's crime, and the wretchedness
of his punishment, would darken the freshly-plastered
walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
melancholy house. Why, then, — while so much of the
soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest-leaves,
— why should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had
already been accurst?

But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to
be turned aside from his well-considered scheme, either by
dread of the wizard's ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities
of any kind, however specious. Had he been told of a bad
air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was ready
to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed

with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite,
fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with
iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably
without so much as imagining an objection to it. On the
score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility
might have taught him, the colonel, like most of his
breed and generation, was impenetrable. He, therefore, dug
his cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on
the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years
before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was a
curious, and, as some people thought, an ominous fact, that,
very soon after the workmen began their operations, the
spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed
by the depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler
cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain that the water
of Maules Well, as it continued to be called, grew hard and
brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old woman
of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

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

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

Maule's-lane, or Pyncheon-street, as it were now more
decorous to call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as
with a congregation on its way to church. All, as they
approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice, which

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

The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of
a church-door, was in the angle between the two front
gables, and was covered by an open porch, with benches
beneath its shelter. Under this arched door-way, scraping
their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the clergymen,
the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too,

thronged the plebeian classes, as freely as their betters, and
in larger number. Just within the entrance, however,
stood two serving-men, pointing some of the guests to the
neighborhood of the kitchen, and ushering others into the
statelier rooms, — hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet
garments, sombre but rich, stiffly-plaited ruffs and
bands, embroidered gloves, venerable beards, the mien and
countenance of authority, made it easy to distinguish the
gentleman of worship, at that period, from the tradesman,
with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern jerkin,
stealing awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps
helped to build.

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

This person — a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment — found it necessary to explain that his
master still remained in his study, or private apartment; on

entering which, an hour before, he had expressed a wish on
no account to be disturbed.

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

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

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

Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots
as might of itself have been audible in the remotest
of the seven gables, he advanced to the door, which the
servant pointed out, and made its new panels reëcho with a

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

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

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

They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing
the lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity,
into the room in advance of them. At the first glimpse,
they beheld nothing extraordinary: a handsomely-furnished
room, of moderate size, somewhat darkened by curtains;
books arranged on shelves; a large map on the wall, and

likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
the original colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with
a pen in his hand. Letters, parchments, and blank sheets
of paper, were on the table before him. He appeared to
gaze at the curious crowd, in front of which stood the lieutenant-governor;
and there was a frown on his dark and
massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness
that had impelled them into his private retirement.

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

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

Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a
vast deal of noise in its day. There were many rumors,
some of which have vaguely drifted down to the present
time, how that appearances indicated violence; that there
were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a

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

It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have
been a serious suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds
for implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator.
The rank, wealth, and eminent character of the deceased,
must have insured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous
circumstance. As none such is on record, it is safe to

assume that none existed. Tradition — which sometimes
brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the
wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the
fireside, and now congeals in newspapers — tradition is
responsible for all contrary averments. In Colonel Pyncheon's
funeral sermon, which was printed, and is still
extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the
many felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly
career, the happy seasonableness of his death. His duties
all performed, — the highest prosperity attained, — his race
and future generations fixed on a stable basis, and with a
stately roof to shelter them, for centuries to come, — what
other upward step remained for this good man to take,
save the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven!
The pious clergyman surely would not have uttered words
like these, had he in the least suspected that the colonel
had been thrust into the other world with the clutch of
violence upon his throat.

The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his
death, seemed destined to as fortunate a permanence as can
anywise consist with the inherent instability of human
affairs. It might fairly be anticipated that the progress of
time would rather increase and ripen their prosperity, than
wear away and destroy it. For, not only had his son and
heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but
there was a claim, through an Indian deed, confirmed by a
subsequent grant of the General Court, to a vast and as
yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of eastern lands.
These possessions — for as such they might almost certainly
be reckoned — comprised the greater part of what is
now known as Waldo County, in the State of Maine, and
were more extensive than many a dukedom, or even a
reigning prince's territory, on European soil. When the
pathless forest, that still covered this wild principality,

should give place — as it inevitably must, though perhaps
not till ages hence — to the golden fertility of human culture,
it would be the source of incalculable wealth to the
Pyncheon blood. Had the colonel survived only a few
weeks longer, it is probable that his great political influence,
and powerful connections, at home and abroad, would have
consummated all that was necessary to render the claim
available. But, in spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory
eloquence, this appeared to be the one thing which
Colonel Pyncheon, provident and sagacious as he was, had
allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the prospective
territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon.
His son lacked not merely the father's eminent position, but
the talent and force of character to achieve it: he could,
therefore, effect nothing by dint of political interest; and
the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent,
after the colonel's decease, as it had been pronounced
in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of
the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.

Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only
then, but at various periods for nearly a hundred years
afterwards, to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in
deeming their right. But, in course of time, the territory
was partly re-granted to more favored individuals, and
partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last,
if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have
laughed at the idea of any man's asserting a right — on
the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded
autographs of governors and legislators long dead and forgotten
— to the lands which they or their fathers had
wrested from the wild hand of nature, by their own sturdy
toil. This impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing
more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation,
an absurd delusion of family importance, which all along

characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest member
of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility,
and might yet come into the possession of princely wealth
to support it. In the better specimens of the breed, this
peculiarity threw an ideal grace over the hard material of
human life, without stealing away any truly valuable
quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase the
liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the
victim of a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while
awaiting the realization of his dreams. Years and years
after their claim had passed out of the public memory, the
Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the colonel's ancient
map, which had been projected while Waldo County was
still an unbroken wilderness. Where the old land-surveyor
had put down woods, lakes, and rivers, they marked out the
cleared spaces, and dotted the villages and towns, and
calculated the progressively increasing value of the territory,
as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately forming
a princedom for themselves.

In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened
to be some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion
of the hard, keen sense, and practical energy, that had
so remarkably distinguished the original founder. His
character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as distinctly
as if the colonel himself, a little diluted, had been
gifted with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At
two or three epochs, when the fortunes of the family were
low, this representative of hereditary qualities had made his
appearance, and caused the traditionary gossips of the town
to whisper among themselves: — “Here is the old Pyncheon
come again! Now the Seven Gables will be new-shingled!”
From father to son, they clung to the ancestral
house, with singular tenacity of home attachment. For
various reasons, however, and from impressions often too

vaguely founded to be put on paper, the writer cherishes the
belief that many, if not most, of the successive proprietors of
this estate, were troubled with doubts as to their moral right
to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no question;
but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy foot-step,
all the way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so,
we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether each
inheritor of the property — conscious of wrong, and failing
to rectify it — did not commit anew the great guilt of his
ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And
supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer
mode of expression to say, of the Pyncheon family, that they
inherited a great misfortune, than the reverse?

We have already hinted, that it is not our purpose to
trace down the history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken
connection with the House of the Seven Gables;
nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the rustiness and
infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house itself.
As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used
to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain
within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected
there, — the old colonel himself, and his many descendants,
some in the garb of antique babyhood, and others in the
bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened
with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that
mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which
it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity
of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery
of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have
been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner
region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they
had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and

happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or
in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination,
indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair of the old
Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule; the curse, which
the latter flung from his scaffold, was remembered, with the
very important addition, that it had become a part of the
Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle
in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper,
between jest and earnest, — “He has Maule's blood to
drink!” The sudden death of a Pyncheon, about a hundred
years ago, with circumstances very similar to what
have been related of the colonel's exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic.
It was considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance,
that Colonel Pyncheon's picture — in obedience, it
was said, to a provision of his will — remained affixed to
the wall of the room in which he died. Those stern,
immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence,
and so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with
the sunshine of the passing hour, that no good thoughts or
purposes could ever spring up and blossom there. To the
thoughtful mind, there will be no tinge of superstition in
what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost
of a dead progenitor — perhaps as a portion of his own punishment
— is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of
his family.

The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part
of two centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude
than has attended most other New England families, during
the same period of time. Possessing very distinctive traits
of their own, they nevertheless took the general characteristics
of the little community in which they dwelt; a town
noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving
inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of

its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder
individuals, and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than
one meets with almost anywhere else. During the Revolution,
the Pyncheon of that epoch, adopting the royal side,
became a refugee; but repented, and made his reäppearance,
just at the point of time to preserve the House of the Seven
Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years, the
most noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise
the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race; no less
than the violent death — for so it was adjudged — of one
member of the family, by the criminal act of another. Certain
circumstances, attending this fatal occurrence, had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted
of the crime; but either the circumstantial nature of the
evidence, and possibly some lurking doubt in the breast of
the executive, or, lastly, — an argument of greater weight
in a republic than it could have been under a monarchy, —
the high respectability and political influence of the criminal's
connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from
death to perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had
chanced about thirty years before the action of our story
commences. Latterly, there were rumors (which few believed,
and only one or two felt greatly interested in) that
this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other,
to be summoned forth from his living tomb.

It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of
this now almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor,
and possessed of great wealth, in addition to the house and
real estate which constituted what remained of the ancient
Pyncheon property. Being of an eccentric and melancholy
turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records
and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought himself, it
is averred, to the conclusion, that Matthew Maule, the wizard,

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

This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young

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

There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves
in the glow of the judge's prosperity. In respect to natural
increase, the breed had not thriven; it appeared rather to be
dying out. The only members of the family known to be
extant were, first, the judge himself, and a single surviving
son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the thirty
years prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House
of the Seven Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the
will of the old bachelor. She was understood to be wretchedly
poor, and seemed to make it her choice to remain so;
inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the judge, had repeatedly
offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old mansion

or his own modern residence. The last and youngest
Pyncheon was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter
of another of the judge's cousins, who had married a young
woman of no family or property, and died early, and in poor
circumstances. His widow had recently taken another husband.

As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now
to be extinct. For a very long period after the witchcraft
delusion, however, the Maules had continued to inhabit
the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust
a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet, honest,
well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public, for the wrong which had been done
them; or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted, from
father to child, any hostile recollection of the wizard's fate,
and their lost patrimony, it was never acted upon, nor openly
expressed. Nor would it have been singular had they ceased
to remember that the House of the Seven Gables was resting
its heavy frame-work on a foundation that was rightfully
their own. There is something so massive, stable, and
almost irresistibly imposing, in the exterior presentment of
established rank and great possessions, that their very existence
seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent
a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men
have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret
minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices
have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
ante-revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture
to be proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus
the Maules, at all events, kept their resentments within their
own breasts. They were generally poverty-stricken; always
plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence
at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the
sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there about

the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the
almshouse, as the natural home of their old age. At last,
after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time, along
the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they
had taken that downright plunge, which, sooner or later, is
the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian.
For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor grave-stone,
nor the directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man,
bore any trace of Matthew Maule's descendants. His blood
might possibly exist elsewhere; here, where its lowly current
could be traced so far back, it had ceased to keep an
onward course.

So long as any of the race were to be found, they had
been marked out from other men — not strikingly, nor as
with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt, rather
than spoken of — by an hereditary character of reserve.
Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within
the sanctity or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior
of sufficient frankness and good-fellowship, it was impossible
for any man to step. It was this indefinable peculiarity,
perhaps, that, by insulating them from human aid, kept them
always so unfortunate in life. It certainly operated to prolong,
in their case, and to confirm to them, as their only
inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious
terror with which the people of the town, even after awakening
from their frenzy, continued to regard the memory of
the reputed witches. The mantle, or rather the ragged
cloak, of old Matthew Maule, had fallen upon his children.
They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes;
the family eye was said to possess strange power. Among
other good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was
especially assigned them: of exercising an influence over
people's dreams. The Pyncheons, if all stories were true,

haughtily as they bore themselves in the noon-day streets
of their native town, were no better than bond-servants to
these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy common-wealth
of sleep. Modern pyschology, it may be, will endeavor
to reduce these alleged necromancies within a system,
instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous.

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

The deep projection of the second story gave the house
such a meditative look, that you could not pass it without
the idea that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history
to moralize upon. In front, just on the edge of the unpaved
sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon-elm, which, in reference to
such trees as one usually meets with, might well be termed
gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson of the
first Pyncheon, and, though now fourscore years of age, or

perhaps nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad
maturity, throwing its shadow from side to side of the
street, overtopping the seven gables, and sweeping the
whole black roof with its pendent foliage. It gave beauty
to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.
The street having been widened about forty years ago, the
front gable was now precisely on a line with it. On either
side extended a ruinous wooden fence, of open lattice-work,
through which could be seen a grassy yard, and, especially
in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of burdocks,
with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two
or three feet long. Behind the house there appeared to be
a garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but
was now infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by
habitations and out-buildings that stood on another street.
It would be an omission, trifling, indeed, but unpardonable,
were we to forget the green moss that had long since gathered
over the projections of the windows, and on the slopes
of the roof; nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye to a
crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing
aloft in the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the
nook between two of the gables. They were called Alice's
Posies. The tradition was, that a certain Alice Pyncheon
had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the dust of the
street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind
of soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had
long been in her grave. However the flowers might have
come there, it was both sad and sweet to observe how
nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying, gusty,
rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the
ever-returning summer did her best to gladden it with tender
beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort.

There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed,
but which, we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque

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

Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked,
bolted, and barred, and, down to the period of our story,
had probably never once been opened. The old counter,
shelves, and other fixtures of the little shop, remained just
as he had left them. It used to be affirmed, that the dead

shopkeeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an apron at
his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his
wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters,
any night of the year, ransacking his till, or poring over
the dingy pages of his day-book. From the look of unutterable
woe upon his face, it appeared to be his doom to
spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance.

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