thorne has thrown into the long agony of the seducer, we never, in our pity for the sufferer, lose our abhorrence of the sin.

Scarcely a twelvemonth has passed, and another New England story," The House with the Seven Gables," has come to redeem the pledge of excellence given by the first.

In this tale, Fate plays almost as great a part as in a Greek Trilogy. Two centuries ago, a certain wicked and powerful Colonel Pyncheon, was seized with a violent desire to possess himself of a certain bit of ground, on which to build the large and picturesque wooden mansion from which the story takes its title. Master Maule, the original possessor, obstinate and poor, refused all offers of money for his land; but being shortly afterward accused, no one very well knows why, of the fashionable sin of witchcraft, the poor man is tried, condemned, and burnt; the property forfeited and sold; and the rich man's house erected without let or pause. But the shadow of a great crime has passed over the place. A bubbling spring, famous for the purity and freshness of its waters, turns salt and bitter, and the rich man himself, the great, powerful, wicked Colonel Pyncheon is found dead in his own hall, stricken by some strange, sudden, mysterious death on the very day of his taking possession, and when he had invited half the province to his house-warming. Both proprietors, the poor old wizard, and the wealthy Colonel, leave one child, and during two succeeding centuries these races, always distant and peculiar, come at long intervals strangely across each other.

Nothing can exceed the skill with which this part of the book is managed. The story is not told; we find it out; we feel that there is a legend; that some strange destiny has hovered over the old house, and hovers there still. The slightness of the means by which this feeling is excited is wonderful. The mixture of the grotesque and the supernatural in Hoffman and the German School, seems coarse and vulgar blundering in the comparison; even the mighty magician of Udolpho, the Anne Radcliffe whom the French quote with so much unction, was a bungler at her trade, when compared with the vague, dim, vapory, impalpable ghastliness with which Mr. Hawthorne has contrived to envelop his narrative.

Two hundred years have passed. The Maules have disappeared; and the Pyncheons are reduced by the mysterious death

of the last proprietor to a poor old maid in extreme poverty, with little left but this decaying mansion; a brother whom she is expecting home after a long, mysterious imprisonment; a Judge, flourishing and prosperous, in whom we at once recognize a true descendant of the wicked Colonel; and a little New England girl, a country cousin, who is the veriest bit of life and light, the brightest beam of sunshine that has ever crossed the Atlantic. Monsieur Eugène Sue had some such inspiration when, in his very happiest moment, he painted Rigolette; but this rose is fresher still. Her name (there is a great deal in names, let Juliet say what she will) is Phoebe. I am not going to tell the story of this book, but I must give one glimpse of Phoebe, although it will very inadequately convey the charm that extends over the whole volume; and to make that understood, I must say that the poor old cousin Hepzibah, "Old Maid Pyncheon," as she is called by her townsfolk-(I wonder whether the Americans do actually bestow upon all their single women that expressive designation one has some right to be curious as to the titles conferred upon one's own order ;)—“ Old Maid Pyncheon" had that very day, for the purpose, as it afterward appeared, of supporting the liberated prisoner, opened in this aristocratic mansion a little shop;-N.B. I had once a fancy to set up a shop myself, not quite of the same kind; but there were other sorts of pride beside my own to be consulted, so beyond a jest, more than halfearnest, with a rich neighbor, who proposed himself as a partner, the fancy hardly came to words. Ah, I have a strong fellowfeeling for that poor Hepzibah-a decayed gentlewoman, elderly, ugly, awkward, near-sighted, cross! I have a deep sympathy with "old maid Pyncheon" as she appears on the morning of this great trial:

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 toward the stairs, like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.

"We must linger a moment on the 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 within its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret her expression almost as unjustly as the world did. 'How miserably cross I look,' she must often have whispered to herself; and ultimately to 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 it retained, while her visage was growing 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 faint-heartedly on the threshold of our story. In very truth, we have a 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 that had here been put to shame. Such had been the condition and state 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. Such 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 shopkeeper Pyncheon's shabbily-provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description and outward form which would 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 production 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 seen galloping along one of the shelves in equipments and uniforms 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 for 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 Æolus that morning-and stepped across the room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing through an intervening passage, she opened a door which communicated with the shop just now so elaborately described, owing to the projection of the upper story, and still more to the dark 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, afte a moment's pause on the threshold, peering toward the window with her near-sighted. scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she projected herself into the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were 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 strange 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 somber 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 and not that of the theme-here is one of the truest points of 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 immediately by doing aught for bread, this born lady, after sixty years of harrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading close upon her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must