Chapter 4 of the House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. A day behind the counter. Towards noon Hepsiba saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and of a remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the pinch and elm, he stopped, and taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the perspiration from his brow, seemed to scrutinize, with a special 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 pension-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 to 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 pension house, both the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance.  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 Hepsiba, 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 Hepsiba 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 the step or two as if designing to enter the shop. But as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepsiba'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 wet before dinner. By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.   Well, what have you to say? Is not the pension house my own while I am alive? After this incident, Hepsiba retreated to the back parlor, where she at first caught up a half-finished stalking, 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. If they acquire a look, which an artist, if he had 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, Hepsiba 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 pension smile as he will, there is that look beneath.  Nobody would doubt that it was the old pension 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 Hepsiba bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old time. She had dwelt too much alone, too long in the pension 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 Hepsiba'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 molded 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 Hepsiba, 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 pension. But here the shop bell rang. It was like a sound from a remote distance. So far had Hepsiba descended into the sepulchral depths of her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a humble resident of Pension Street, and whom, for a great many years past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He was in a memorial personage, who seemed always to have had a whitehead in 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 Hepsiba was, she could not remember when Uncle Viner, 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 gate, 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 house, in winter to shovel away the snow from the sidewalk, or open the path to the woodshed, or along the clothes line. Such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Vinner performed among at least a score of families. Within that circle he claimed the same sort of privilege and probably felt 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 over flowings 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 Vinner 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 pretentions 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 wallflower of his mind in its small dilapidation and gave him a charm to what might have been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life. Hepsiba 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 Vinner was himself the most ancient existence, whether of man or thing in Pension Street, except the house of the Seven Gables and perhaps the Elm that overshadowed it. This patriarch now presented himself before Hepsiba, 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 towel 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 Vinner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself, but in good measure somebody else, patched together two of different epochs and 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 one is neither, unless when the rheumatized 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 Hepsiba. Thank you, Uncle Vinner, said Hepsiba, 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 Hepsiba, answered the old man.  Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now. It seems so little while ago 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 heir, 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 heirs. 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 stoop so much to lower to them. I met your cousin, the judge, ten minutes ago, and in my old towel-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 Hepsiba, 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 Viner, on that's rather remarkable in a pension. For begging your pardon, Ms. Hepsiba, they never had the name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting close to them. But now, Ms. Hepsiba, if an old man may be bold to ask, why don't judge pension with his great means?  It's for your credit to be doing something, but it's not for the judge's credit to let you.  I ought to say, however, that if I choose to earn bread for myself, it is not judge pension's fault. Neither will he deserve the blame, added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Viner's privileges of age and humble familiarity. If I should buy and buy, 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 was something positively delightful in the prospect. No bad place is the Great Brick Farmhouse, 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 airtight 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, Ms. Hepsiba, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse.  You never need go there. Something still better will turn up for you. I'm sure of it. Hepsiba fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable friend's look and tone, and so much 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 mold any judicious and moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepsiba 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 50 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 unrecognable riches. Or the member of parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the family, with which the elder stock on his side of the Atlantic had held little or no intercourse for the last two centuries, this eminent gentleman might invite Hepsiba to quit the ruinous house of the Seven Gables and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pension Hall. But for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to his request. It was more probable, therefore, that the descendants of a pension who had immigrated to Virginia, in some past generation, and become a great planter there, hearing of Hepsiba'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 the 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 pensions, so that instead of keeping a cent shop, Hepsiba 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 Vinner's casual attempt at encouragement kindled a strange festival 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 scow disturbed his recollection, as it might a more courageous man's. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic, Uncle Vinner was pleased to favor Hepsiba 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 a very plenty about town.  Brew your own yeast, and make your own ginger beer. And while Hepsiba 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 good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon. To this last apathem, poor Hepsiba responded with a sigh so deep and heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Vinner 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 Hepsiba, turning pale. Ah, you don't love to talk about it, said Uncle Vinner. Well, well, we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town. I remember him, Miss Hepsiba, before he could run alone.  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 phantoms of a half-conscious slumber. She still responded mechanically to the frequent summons of the shop fell, 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 suppose, the identical thing they asked for. There is sad confusion indeed when the spirit thus flips away into the past and 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. It's 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 habit, there was a great influx of custom in the course of the afternoon. Hepsiba bluntered to and fro about her small place of business, committing the most unheard of errors, now stringing up 12 and now seven tallow candles instead of 10 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 offener 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 nine pins, which ultimately proved to be copper likewise. At this price or 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 having ought 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. Hepsiba'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 and gingerbread and huddled the small customer out of the shop. Then she muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking and put up the oak and bar across the door. During the latter process, an omnibus came to a standstill under the branches of the elm tree. Hepsiba's heart was in her mouth. Remote and dusky and with no sunshine on all the intervening space was that region of the past where 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, no wise 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 re-entered the vehicle. The girl 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 band box. First giving a sharp wrap of the old iron knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the doorstep and departed. Who can it be? thought Hepsiba, who had been screwing her visual organs into the acutist 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 the 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 was 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?  Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the pension 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 kin's folk to visit one another without invitation or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet in consideration of Ms. Hepsiba's recluse way of life, a letter had actually been written and dispatched, 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 Pension Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at the House of the Seven Gables. Now she can stay only one night, said Hepsiba, unbolting the door. If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him. End of Chapter 4 of The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read by Nicodemus. Chapter 5. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public's domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 5 of The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read by Nicodemus. May and November. Phoebe Pension slept on the night of her arrival in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came flooding through the window and bathed the dingy ceiling and paper hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebe's bed, a dark antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of stuff which had been rich and even magnificent in its time, but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest there with the bloom on her cheeks like the morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs as when an early breeze moves the foliage, the dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maiden, such as the dawn is immortally, gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes. At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke and for a moment did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing, indeed, was absolutely plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that whatever might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her prayers. She was more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall stiff chairs, one of which stood close by her bedside and looked as if some old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night and had vanished only just in season to escape discovery. When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window and saw a rose bush in the garden. Being a very tall one and of luxuriant growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house and was literally covered with the rare and beautiful species of white rose. A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight or mildew at their hearts, but viewed at a fair distance, the whole rose bush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer, together with the mold in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless, that it had been planted by Alice Pension. She was Phoebe's great, great grand aunt, in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation as a garden plat, was now unctuous with nearly 200 years of vegetable decay. Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their creator, nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebe's young breath mingled with it as the fragrance floated past the window. Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and brought them to her chamber. Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them, and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade. No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim, as it were, Phoebe's waist, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had been untenanted so long, except by spiders and mice and rats and ghosts, that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to obliterate every trace of man's happier hours. What was precisely Phoebe's process, we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there, brought some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow, looped up or let down a window curtain, and in the course of half an hour, had succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile over the apartment. No longer ago than the night before, it had resembled nothing so much as the old maid's heart, for there was neither sunshine nor household fire in one or the other, and save for ghosts and ghostly reminiscences, not a guest for many years gone by, had entered the heart or the chamber. There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm. The bed chamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied experience as a scene of human life. The joy of bridal nights had throbbed itself away here. New immortals had first drawn earthly breath here, and here old people had died. But whether it were the white roses or whatever the subtle influence might be, the person of delicate instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden's bed chamber and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her sweet breath and happy thoughts. Her dreams of the past night, being such cheerful ones, had exercised the gloom and now haunted the chamber in its stead. After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her chamber with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the rose bush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing there in a wilderness of neglect and obstructing one another's development as is often the parallel case in human society by their uneducated entanglement and confusion. At the head of the stairs, however, she met Hepsaba, who at being still early, invited her into a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her education embraced any such French phrase. It was strewn about with a few old books and a work basket and a dusty writing desk and had on one side a large black article of furniture of very strange appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord. It looked more like a coffin than anything else and indeed, not having been played upon or opened for years, there must have been a vast deal of dead music in it stifled for want of air. Human finger was hardly known to have touched its cords since the day of Alice's pension, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe. Hepsaba Bade, her young guest, sit down and herself taking a chair nearby, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets. Cousin Phoebe said she had last, I really can't see my way clear to keep you with me. These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which they may strike the reader for the two relatives in a talk before bedtime had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding. Hepsaba knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances resulting from the second marriage of the girl's mother, which made it desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she misinterpret Phoebe's character and the genial activity pervading it. One of the most valuable traits of the true New England woman, which had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her fortune, but with a self-respecting purpose to confer as much benefit as she could any wise receive. As one of her nearest kindred, she had naturally be taken herself to Hepsaba with no idea of forcing herself on her cousin's protection, but only for a visit of a week or two, which might be indefinitely extended should it prove for the happiness of both. To Hepsaba's blunt observation, therefore, Phoebe replied as frankly and more cheerfully. Dear cousin, I cannot tell you how it will be, said she, but I really think we may suit one another much better than you suppose. You are a nice girl, I see it plainly, continued Hepsaba, and it is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate. But Phoebe, this house of mine, is but a melancholy place for a young person to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow too, and the garrison upper chambers in wintertime, but it never lets in the sunshine. And as for myself, you see what I am, a dismal and lonesome old woman, for I begin to call myself old Phoebe, whose temper I am afraid is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be. I cannot make your life pleasant, cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as give you bread to eat. You will find me a cheerful little body, answered Phoebe, smiling, and yet with a kind of gentle dignity. And I mean to earn my bread. You know I have not been brought up a pension. A girl learns many things in a new England village. Ah, Phoebe, said Hepsibus, sighing, your knowledge would do but little for you here.  Those cheeks would not be so rosy after a month or two.  And indeed the contrast was very striking. You see how pale I am? It is my idea that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome for the longs. There is the garden, the flowers to be taken care of, observed Phoebe. I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air. And after all child exclaimed Hepsibus, suddenly rising as if to dismiss the subject, it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or inhabitant of the old pension house. Its master is coming. Do you mean Judge Pension, asked Phoebe in surprise. Judge Pension, answered her cousin angrily, he will hardly cross the threshold while I live. No, no.  She went in quest of the miniature, already described, and returned with it in her hand. Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features narrowly and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl would show herself affected by the picture. How do you like the face, asked Hepsibus? It is handsome. It is very beautiful, said Phoebe admiringly. It is as sweet a face as a man's can be or ought to be. It has something of a child's expression and yet not childish. Only one feels so very kindly towards him. He ought never to suffer anything. One would bear much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, cousin Hepsibus? Did you never hear, whispered her cousin, bending towards her, of Clifford Pension? Never. I thought there were no pensions left except yourself and our cousin Jaffrey, answered Phoebe. And yet I seem to have heard the name of Clifford Pension. Yes, from my father or my mother. But has he not been along while dead? Well, well, child, perhaps he has, said Hepsibus with a sad, hollow laugh. But in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very apt to come back again. We shall see. And, cousin Phoebe, since after all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as your kin's woman can offer you. With this measured but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable purpose, Hepsibus kissed her cheek. They now went below stairs where Phoebe, not so much assuming the office as attracting it to herself by the magnetism of innate fitness, took the most active part in preparing breakfast. The mistress of the house, meanwhile, as usual with persons of her stiff and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside, willing to lend her aid, yet conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the business in hand.  Hepsibus gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help being interested, however, and even amused at the readiness with which her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances and brought the house more over, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness for her purposes. Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious effort and with frequent outbreaks of song which were exceedingly pleasant to the ear. This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a bird in the shadowy tree, or conveyed the idea that the stream of life warbled through her heart, as a brook sometimes warbles through a pleasant little dell. It betokened the cheeriness of an active temperament, finding joy in its activity, and therefore rendering it beautiful. It was a New England trait, the stern old stuff of Puritanism with a gold thread in the web. Hepsibus brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon them, and a china tea set painted over with grotesque figures of man, bird, and beast, and as grotesque a landscape. These pictured people were odd humorists in a world of their own, a world of vivid brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of tea drinking. Your great, great, great, great grandmother had these cups when she was married, said Hepsibus to Phoebe. She was a Davenport of a good family. They were almost the first tea cups ever seen in the colony, and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it. But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle tea cup when I remember what my heart has gone through without breaking. The cups, not having been used perhaps since Hepsibus' youth, had contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this invaluable China.  Do you do other things as well? Are you as good at your book as you are at washing tea cups? Not quite, I am afraid, said Phoebe, laughing at the form of Hepsibus' question, but I was schoolmistress for the little children in our district last summer and might have been so still. Ah, it is all very well, observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up, but these things must have come to you with your mother's blood. I never knew a penchant that had any turn for them. It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain or even more so of their deficiencies than of their available gifts, as was Hepsibus of this native inapplicability, so to speak, of the pensions to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an hereditary trait, and so perhaps it was, but unfortunately a morbid one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society. Before they left the breakfast table, the shop bell rang sharply and Hepsibus set down the remnant of her final cup of tea with a look of shallow despair that was truly piteous to behold. In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first. We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs. At all events, Hepsibus had fully satisfied herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wanted to this peevishly obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always smote upon her nervous system, rudely and suddenly. And especially now, while with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering herself with ideas of gentility. She felt an unspeakable disinclination to confront a customer. Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin, cried Phoebe, starting lightly up. I am shopkeeper today. You child, exclaimed Hepsibus, what can a little country girl know of such matters? Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store, said Phoebe, and I have had a table at a fancy fair and made better sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt. They depend upon a knack that comes, I suppose, added she smiling, with one's mother's blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as I am a housewife. The old gentle woman stole behind Phoebe and peeped from the passageway into the shop to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a case of some intricacy, a very ancient woman in a white short gown and a green petticoat with a string of gold beads about her neck and what looked like a nightcap on her head had brought a quantity of yarn to bother for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very last person in town who still kept the time-honoured spinning wheel in constant revolution. It was worthwhile to hear the croaking and hollow tones of the old lady and the pleasant voice of Phoebe mingling in one twisted dread of talk and still better to contrast their figures so light and gloomy, so decrepit and dusky with only the counter betwixt them in one sense but more than three score years in another. As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slowness and craft pitted against native truth and sagacity. Was not that well done? asked Phoebe, laughing when the customer was gone. Nicely done indeed, child, answered Hepsaba. I could not have gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack that belongs to you on your mother's side. It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors in life's stirring scenes. So genuine, in fact, that the former are usually feigned to make it palatable to their self-love by assuming that these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which they choose to deem higher and more important. Thus, Hepsaba was well content to acknowledge Phoebe's vast superior gifts as a shopkeeper. She listened with compliant ear to her suggestion of various methods, whereby the influx of trade might be increased and rendered profitable without a hazardous outlay of capital. She consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid and in cakes, and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectarius to the palate, and of rare stomacic virtues, and moreover, should bake and exhibit for sale some little spice cakes which whosoever tasted would longingly desire to taste again. All such proofs of a ready-mind and skillful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic huckstress so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile and a half-natural sigh and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and growing affection. What a nice little body she is if she only could be a lady too, but that's impossible. Phoebe is no pension. She takes everything from her mother. As to Phoebe's not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it was a point perhaps difficult to decide, but which could hardly have come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many lady-like attributes with so many others that form no necessary, if compatible, part of the character. She shocks no canon of taste. She was admirably in keeping with herself and never jarred against surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sure, so small as to be almost childlike and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier to it than rest, would hardly have suited one's idea of a countess.  She was very pretty, as graceful as a bird and graceful much in the same way, as pleasant about the house, as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the wall while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of discussing her claim to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the example of feminine grace and availability combined in a state of society if there were any such where ladies did not exist. There it should be women's office to move in the midst of practical affairs and to gild them all the very homeliest were it even the scouring of pots and kettles with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy. Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the born and educated lady on the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepsaba, our forlorn old maid, in her rustling and rusty silks with her deeply cherished and ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to princely territory, and in the way of accomplishment, her recollections it may be of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord and walked a minuet and worked on antique tapestry stitch on her sampler. It was a fair parallel between new plebianism and old gentility. It really seemed as if the battered visage of the house of the seven gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of the girl's presence. There was a great run of custom setting steadily in from about 10 o'clock until towards noon, relaxing somewhat at dinnertime, but recommencing in the afternoon and finally dying away a half an hour or so before the long day's sunset. One of the stanchist patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and the Elephant, who today signalized his omnivorous prowess by swallowing two drama dairies and a locomotive. Phoebe laughed as she summed up her aggregate of sails upon the slate, while Hepsiba, first drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into the till. We must renew our stock, cousin Hepsiba, cried the little saleswoman. The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those Dutch wooden milkmaids and most of our other play things. There has been constant inquiry for cheap raisins and a great cry for whistles and trumpets and juice harps, and at least a dozen little boys have asked for molasses candy. And we must contrive to get a peck of russet apples late in the season as it is. But dear cousin, what an enormous heap of copper, positively a copper mountain. Well done, well done, well done, quote Uncle Venner, who had taken occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course of the day. Here's a girl that will never end her days at my farm.  Yes, Phoebe is a nice girl, said Hepsiba, with the scowl of austere approbation. But Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great many years. Could you tell me whether there ever was a pension whom she takes after? I don't believe there ever was, answered the venerable man. At any rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor for that matter, anywhere else. I've seen a great deal of the world, not only in people's kitchens and backyards, but at the street corners and on the wharves and in other places where my business calls me. And I'm free to say, Miss Hepsiba, that I never knew a human creature do her work so much like one of God's angels as this child Phoebe does. Uncle Venner's eulogium, if it appear rather too high strained for the person and occasion, had nevertheless a sense in which it was both subtle and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phoebe's activity. The life of the long and busy day spent in occupations that might so easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect, had been made pleasant and even lovely by the spontaneous grace with which these homely duties seemed to bloom out of her character. So that labor, while she dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them, and so did Phoebe. The two relatives, the young maid and the old one, found time before nightfall in the intervals of trade to make rapid advances toward affection and confidence. A recluse like Hepsiba usually displays remarkable frankness and at least temporary affability on being absolutely cornered and brought to the point of personal intercourse. Like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you once overcome. The old gentle woman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading Phoebe from room to room of the house and recounting the traditions with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She showed the indentions made by the Lieutenant Governor's sword hilt in the door panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pynchon, a dead host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown. The dusky terror of that frown, Hepsiba observed, was thought to be lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phoebe step into one of the tall chairs and inspect the ancient map of the Pynchon territory at the eastward. An attractive land on which she laid her finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pynchon himself, but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by government. Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the Pynchon should have just stunned them. She told, too, how that there was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house or in the cellar or possibly in the garden. If you should happen to find it, Phoebe, said Hepsiba, glancing aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, we will tie up the shop bell for good and all. Yes, dear cousin, answered Phoebe, but in the meantime I hear somebody ringing it. When the customer was gone, Hepsiba talked rather vaguely and at great length about a certain Alice Pynchon who had been exceedingly beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime 100 years ago. The fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the place where she had lived, as a dried rosebud sensed the drawer where it has withered and perished. This lovely Alice had met with some great and mysterious calamity and had grown thin and white and gradually faded out of the world. But even now she was supposed to haunt the house of the seven gables and the great many times, especially when one of the Pynchons was to die, she had been heard playing sadly and beautifully on the harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it had sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of music. It was so exquisitely mournful that nobody to this day could bear to hear it played unless when a great sorrow had made them know the still profounders sweetness of it. Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me, inquired Phoebe? The very same said Hepsiba. It was Alice Pynchon's harpsichord. When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So as I could only play on my teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all my music long ago. Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the daguerreotypist, whom as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly young man and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up his residence in one of the seven gables. But on seeing more of Mr. Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him. He had the strangest companions imaginable, men with long beards and dressed in linen blouses and other such newfangled and ill-fitting garments, reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking philanthropists, community men and come-outers, as Hepsiba believed, who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food but lived on the scent of other people's cookery and turned up their noses at the fair. As for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper the other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and disorganizing matter at a meeting of his bandit-like associates. For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practiced animal magnetism, and if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt to suspect him of studying the black art up there in his lonesome chamber. But dear cousin, said Phoebe, if the young man is so dangerous, why do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on fire? Why, sometimes, answered Hepsiba, I have seriously made it a question whether I ought to send him away. But with all his oddities, he is a quiet kind of person, and has such a way of taking hold of one's mind that without exactly liking him, for I don't know enough of the young man, I should be sorry to lose sight of him entirely. A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so much alone as I do. But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person, remonstrated Phoebe, a part of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law. Oh, said Hepsiba carelessly, for formal as she was, still in her life's experience she had gnashed her teeth against human law. I suppose he has a law of his own. End of chapter five of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read by Nicodemus. Chapter six. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter six of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read by Nicodemus. Malls well. After an early tea, the little country girl strayed into the garden. The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted within small compass and hemmed about partly by high wooden fences and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street. In its center was a grass-plat, surrounding a ruinous little structure which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had once been a summer house. A hop vine, springing from last year's root, was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the roof with its green mantle. Three of the seven gables, either fronted or looked sideways with a dark solemnity of aspect down into the garden. The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time, such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seed vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again in such rank weeds symbolic of the transmitted vices of society, as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings. Phoebe saw, however, that their growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rose bush had evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement of the season, and the pear tree and three damson trees, which, except a row of current bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit for marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective limbs. There were also a few species of antique and hereditary flowers in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded, as if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining. The remainder of the garden presented a well-selected assortment of escalant vegetables in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer squashes, almost in their golden blossom, cucumbers, now evincing a tendency to spread away from the main stalk and ramble far and wide, two or three rows of string beans, and as many more that were about to festoon themselves on poles, tomatoes occupying a site so sheltered and sunny that the plants were already gigantic and promised an early and abundant harvest. Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted these vegetables and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely her cousin Hepsibus, who had no taste nor spirits for the ladylike employment of cultivating flowers, and with her recluse habits and tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house, would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes. It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects, Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little look of grass and foliage and aristocratic flowers and plebeian vegetables. The eye of heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly and with the peculiar smile, as if glad to perceive that nature elsewhere overwhelmed and driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a breathing place. The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace and yet a very gentle one from the fact that a pair of robins had built their nest in the pear tree and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees too, strange to say, had thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from the range of hives beside some farmhouse miles away. How many aerial voyages might they have made in quest of honey, or honey laden betwixt dawn and sunset? Yet late as it now was, there still arose a pleasant hum out of one or two of the squash blossoms in the depths of which these bees were plying their golden labor. There was one other object in the garden which nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own. This was a fountain set round with the rim of old mossy stones and paved in its bed with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic work of variously colored pebbles. The play and slight agitation of the water and its upward gush wrought magically with these variegated pebbles and made a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too suddenly to be definable. Fence swelling over the rim of moss-grown stones, the water stole away under the fence through what we regret to call a gutter rather than a channel. Nor must we forget to mention a hencoupe, a very reverend antiquity that stood in the farther corner of the garden, not a great way from the fountain. It now contained only Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary chicken. All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the pension family and were said, while in their prime, to have attained almost the size of turkeys and on the score of delicate flesh to be fit for a prince's table. In proof of the authenticity of this legendary renown, Hepsiba could have exhibited the shell of a great egg, which an ostrich need hardly have been ashamed of. Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger than pigeons and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect and a gouty kind of movement and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the variations of their clucking and cackling. It was evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure. These feathered people had existed too long in their distinct variety, a fact of which the present representatives judging by the lugubrious deportment seemed to be aware. They kept themselves alive unquestionably and laid now and then an egg and hatched a chicken, not for any pleasure of their own, but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so admirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a crest of lamentably scanty growth in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedly analogous to Hepsiba's turban that Phoebe, to the poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably, was led to fancy a general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable relative. The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes, and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call which they seemed to recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran with some show of liveliness to her feet while Chanticleer and the ladies of his household regarded her with queer, side-long glances and then croaked one to another as if communicating their sage opinions of her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect as to give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a time-honored race, but that they had existed in their individual capacity ever since the house of the seven gables was founded and were somehow mixed up with its destiny. They were a species of tutelary sprite or banshee, although winged and feathered differently from most other guardian angels.  Here are some nice crumbs for you. The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its mother, possessing indeed the whole antiquity of its progenitors and miniature, mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on Phoebe's shoulder. That little fowl pays you a high compliment, said a voice behind Phoebe. Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man who had found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable than that when she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes. The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance, continued he in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at first fancied it. Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seemed very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so soon. They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food. Miss Hepsiva, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other traditions and set it down that the fowls know you to be a pension. The secret is, said Phoebe, smiling, that I have learned how to talk with hens and chickens. Ah, but these hens, answered the young man, these hens of aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a barnyard fowl. I prefer to think, and so would Miss Hepsiva, that they recognize the family tone, for you are a pension. My name is Phoebe pension, said the girl, with a manner of some reserve, for she was aware that her new acquaintance should be no other than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid had given her a disagreeable idea. I did not know that my cousin Hepsiva's garden was under another person's care. Yes, said Holgrave, I dig and hoe and weed in this black old earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped here. I turn up the earth by a way of pastime. My sober occupation, so far as I have any, is with a lighter material. In short, I make pictures out of sunshine, and not to be too much dazzled with my own trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepsiva to let me lodge in one of these dusky gables. It is like a bandage over one's eyes to come into it, but would you like to see a specimen of my productions? Of the daguerreotype likeness, do you mean? Asked Phoebe with less reserve, for in spite of prejudice, her own youthfulness sprang forward to meet his. I don't much like pictures of that sort. They are so hard and stern, besides dodging away from the eye and trying to escape altogether. They are conscious of looking very unamiable, I suppose, and therefore hate to be seen. If you would permit me, said the artist, looking at Phoebe, I should like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits on a perfectly amiable face, but there certainly is truth in what you have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable, but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is because the originals are so. There is a wonderful insight in heaven's broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with the truth that no painter would ever venture upon. Even could he detect it. There is at least no flattery in my humble line of art. Now here is a likeness, which I have taken over and over again and still with no better result. Yet the original wares, to common eyes, a very different expression. It would gratify me to have your judgment on this character. He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a Morocco case. Phoebe merely glanced at it and gave it back. I know the face, she replied, for its stern eye has been following me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor who hangs yonder in the parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait without its black velvet cap and gray beard and have given him a modern coat and satin cravat instead of his cloak and band. I don't think him improved by your alterations. You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer, said Holgrave, laughing, yet apparently much struck. I can assure you that this is a modern face and one which you will very probably meet. Now the remarkable point is that the original wares to the world's eye and for ought I know to his most intimate friends, and exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny good humor, and other praise with the qualities of that cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story and will not be coked out of it after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and with all cold as ice. Look at that eye. Would you like to be at its mercy? At that mouth, could it ever smile? And yet, if you could only see the benign smile of the original, it is so much the more unfortunate as he is a public character of some eminence and the likeness was intended to be engraved. Well, I don't wish to see it anymore, observed Phoebe, turning away her eyes. It is certainly very like the old portrait, but my cousin Hepsaba has another picture, a miniature. If the original is still in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and hard. You have seen that picture then, exclaimed the artist with an expression of much interest. I never did, but have a great curiosity to do so. And you judge favorably of the face? There never was a sweeter one, said Phoebe. It is almost too soft and gentle for a man's. Is there nothing wild in the eye, continued whole grave, so earnestly that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he presumed on their so recent acquaintance. Is there nothing dark or sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been guilty of a great crime? It is nonsense, said Phoebe a little impatiently, for us to talk about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some other, a crime indeed, since you are a friend of my cousin Hepsaba's, you should ask her to show you the picture. It will suit my purpose still better to see the original, replied the daguerreotypist Cooley. As to his character, we need not discuss its points. They have already been settled by a competent tribunal, or one which called itself competent. But stay, do not go yet, if you please. I have a proposition to make you. Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back with some hesitation, for she did not exactly comprehend his manner. Although on better observation, its features seemed rather to be lack of ceremony than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by Hepsaba's courtesy. If agreeable to you, he observed, it would give me pleasure to turn over these flowers and those ancient and respectable fowls to your care. Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon feel the need of some such out-of-door employment. My own sphere does not so much lie among flowers. You can trim and tend them, therefore, as you please, and I will ask only the least trifle of a blossom, now and then, in exchange for all the good, honest kitchen vegetables with which I propose to enrich Ms. Hepsaba's table. So we will be fellow laborers, somewhat on the community system. Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phoebe accordingly betook herself to weeding a flower bed, but busied herself still more with cogitations respecting this young man, with whom she so unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity. She did not altogether like him. His character perplexed the little country girl as it might a more practiced observer. For while the tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impression left on her mind was that of gravity and, except as his youth modified it, almost sternness. She rebelled, as it were, against the certain magnetic element in the artist's nature, which he exercised towards her, possibly without being conscious of it. After a little while, the twilight, deepened by the shadows of the fruit trees in the surrounding buildings, threw an obscurity over the garden. There, said Holgrave, it's time to give overwork. That last stroke of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk. Good night, Ms. Phoebe-Pension. Any bright day, if you will put one of those rose buds in your hair and come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of sunshine and make a picture of the flower and its wearer. He retired towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head on reaching the door and called to Phoebe with a tone which certainly had laughter in it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest. Be careful not to drink at Maul's well, said he, neither drink nor bathe your face in it. Maul's well, answered Phoebe. Is that it with the rim of mossy stones? I have not thought of drinking there, but why not? Oh, rejoined the daguerreotypist, because like an old lady's cup of tea, it is water bewitched. He vanished and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light and then the steady beam of a lamp and a chamber of the gable. On returning into Hepsiba's apartment of the house, she found the low-studded parlor so dim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate the interior. She was indistinctly aware, however, that the gaunt figure of the old gentlewoman was sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs, a little withdrawn from the window, the faint gleam of which showed the blanched paleness of her cheek, turned sideways towards the corner. Shall I light a lamp, cousin Hepsiba, she asked. Do, if you please, my dear child, answered Hepsiba, but put it on the table in the corner of the passage. My eyes are weak and I can seldom bear the lamp-light on them. What an instrument is the human voice? How wonderfully responsive to every emotion of the human soul. In Hepsiba's tone, at that moment, there was a certain rich depth and moisture as if the words, commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart. Again, while lighting the lamp in the kitchen, Phoebe fancied that her cousin spoke to her. In a moment, cousin answered the girl, these matches just glimmer and go out. But instead of a response from Hepsiba, she seemed to hear the murmur of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So vague was it that its impression or echo in Phoebe's mind was that of unreality. She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound for that of the human voice or else that it was altogether in her fancy. She set the lighted lamp in the passage and again entered the parlor. Hepsiba's form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was now less imperfectly visible. In the remote parts of the room, however, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was nearly the same obscurity as before. Cousin, said Phoebe, did you speak to me just now? No child, replied Hepsiba. Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them. Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful. The tone seemed to gush up out of the deep well of Hepsiba's heart, all steeped in its profoundest emotion. There was a tremor in it, too, that as all strong feeling is electric, partly communicated itself to Phoebe. The girl sat silently for a moment, but soon, her senses being very acute, she became conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room. Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and healthy, gave her a perception operating with almost the effect of a spiritual medium that somebody was near at hand. My dear cousin, asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, is there not someone in the room with us? Phoebe, my dear little girl, said Hepsiba after a moment's pause.  Pray go to bed, for I am sure you must need rest. I will sit in the parlor awhile and collect my thoughts. It has been my custom for more years, child, than you have lived. While thus dismissing her, the maiden lady stepped forward, kissed Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell. How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart that it could afford to well over thus abundantly? Good night, cousin, said Phoebe, strangely affected by Hepsiba's manner. If you begin to love me, I am glad. She retired to her chamber, but did not soon fall asleep, nor then very profoundly. At some uncertain period in the depths of night, and as it were, through the thin veil of a dream, she was conscious of a footstep mounting the stairs heavily, but not with force and decision. The voice of Hepsiba, with the hush through it, was going up along with the footsteps, and again responsive to her cousin's voice, Phoebe heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an indistinct shadow of human utterance. End of chapter six of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. Chapter seven, this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter seven of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus. The guest, when Phoebe awoke, which she did with the early twittering of the conjugal couple of robins in the pear tree, she heard movements below stairs and hastening down, found Hepsiba already in the kitchen. She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose, as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepsiba's hand. And the kitchen in such an event would forthwith have streamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, lauded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old fashions of English dishes and illustrated with engravings which represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle. And amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art, not one of which probably had been tested within the memory of any man's grandfather, poor Hepsiba was seeking for some nimble little titbit which, with what skill she had and such materials as were at hand, she might toss up for breakfast. Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume and inquired of Phoebe whether old speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid an egg the preceding day. Phoebe ran to sea, but returned without the expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of a fish dealer's conch was heard, announcing his approach along the street.  Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffee which she casually observed with the real mocha and so long kept that each of the small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold, the maiden lady heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. The country girl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make an Indian cake after her mother's peculiar method of easy manufacture in which she could vouch for as possessing a richness and if rightly prepared, a delicacy unequaled by any other mode of breakfast cake. Hepsiba gladly assenting, the kitchen was soon the scene of savory preparation. Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cookmaids looked wanderingly on or peeped down the great breadth of the flu, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hiding places and sat on their hind legs, snuffing the fuming atmosphere and wistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble. Hepsiba had no natural turn for cookery and to say the truth had fairly incurred her present meagerness by often choosing to go without her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit or ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an heroic test of sentiment. It was touching and positively worthy of tears if Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts of Forsed, had not been better employed than in shedding them to see her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals and proceed to broil the mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry. She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of attention as if we know not how to express it otherwise, as if her own heart were on the gridiron and her immortal happiness were involved in its being done precisely to a turn. Life within doors has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-provisioned breakfast table. We come to it freshly in the dewy youth of the day and when our spiritual and sensual elements are in better accord than at a later period so that the material delights of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed without any very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for yielding even a trifle over much to the animal department of our nature. The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a pecancy and mirthfulness and oftentimes a vivid truth which more rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner. Hepsiba's small and ancient table supported on its slender and graceful legs and covered with the cloth of the richest Damasque looked worthy to be the scene and center of one of the cheerfulness of parties. The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the shrine of a barbarian idol while the fragrance of the mocha might have gratified the nostrils of a tutelary lar or whatever power has scope over a modern breakfast table. Hepsiba's Indian cakes were the sweetest offering of all and their hue befitting the rustic altars of the innocent and golden age or so brightly yellow were they resembling some of the bread which has changed to glistening gold when Midas tried to eat it. The butter must not be forgotten. Butter which Phoebe herself had churned in her own rural home and brought it to her cousin as a propitiatory gift smelling of clover blossoms and diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the dark panel parlor. All this with the quaint gorgeousness of the old China cups and sauces and the crested spoons and a silver cream jug Hepsiba's only other article of plate and shaped like the rudest poringer set out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pynchon's guests need not have scorned to take his place. But the Puritan's face scowled down out of the picture as if nothing on the table pleased his appetite. By way of contributing what grace she could Phoebe gathered some roses and a few other flowers possessing either scent or beauty and arranged them in a glass pitcher which having long ago lost its handle was so much the fitter for a flower vase. The early sunshine as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and Adam sat at breakfast there came twinkling through the branches of the pear tree and fell quite across the table. All was ready now. There were chairs and plates for three a chair and plate for Hepsiba the same for Phoebe but what other guests did her cousin look for? Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in Hepsiba's frame an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the quivering of her gaunt shadow as thrown by the firelight on the kitchen wall or by the sunshine on the parlor floor. Its manifestations were so various and agreed so little with one another that the girl knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed an ecstasy of delight and happiness.  She appeared to do so by an inevitable impulse and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness of which she must need poor out a little in order to gain breathing room. The next moment without any visible cause for the change her unwanted joy shrank back appalled as it were and clothed itself in mourning or it ran and hid itself so to speak in the dungeon of her heart where it had long lane chained while a cold spectral sorrow took the place of the imprisoned joy that was afraid to be enfranchised. A sorrow as black as that was bright. She often broke into a little nervous hysteric laugh more touching than any tears could be and forthwith as if to try which was the most touching a gush of tears would follow or perhaps the laughter in tears came both at once and surrounded our poor Hepsiba in a moral sense with the kind of pale dim rainbow. Towards Phoebe as we have said, she was affectionate far tenderer than ever before and their brief acquaintance except for that one kiss on the preceding night. Yet with the continually recurring pettishness and irritability she would speak sharply to her then throwing aside all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner ask pardon and the next instant renew the just for given injury at last when their mutual labor was all finished she took Phoebe's hand in her own trembling one. Bear with me my dear child. She cried for truly my heart is full to the brim. Bear with me for I love you Phoebe though I speak so roughly think nothing of it dearest child by and by I shall be kind and only kind. My dearest cousin cannot you tell me what has happened ask Phoebe with a sunny and tearful sympathy. What is it that moves you so? Hush hush he is coming whispered Hepsiba hastily wiping her eyes. Let him see you first Phoebe for you are young and rosy and cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no. He always liked bright faces and mine is old now and the tears are hardly dry on it. He never could abide tears. There draw the curtain a little so that the shadow may fall across his side of the table. But let there be a good deal of sunshine too for he never was fond of gloom as some people are.  Thus murmuring in an undertone as if speaking rather to her own heart than to Phoebe the old gentle woman stepped on tiptoe about the room making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis. Meanwhile, there was a step in the passageway above stairs. Phoebe recognized it as the same which had passed upward as through her dream in the nighttime. The approaching guest whoever it might be appeared to pause at the head of the staircase. He paused twice or thrice in the descent. He paused again at the foot. Each time the delay seemed to be without purpose but rather from a forgetfulness of the purpose which had set him in motion. Or as if the person's feet came involuntarily to a standstill because the motive power was too feeble to sustain his progress. Finally, he made a long pause at the threshold of the parlor. He took hold of the knob of the door then loosened his grasp without opening. Hepsiba, her hands convulsively clasped stood gazing at the entrance. Dear cousin Hepsiba, pray don't look so said Phoebe trembling. For her cousin's emotion on this mysteriously reluctant step made her feel as if a ghost were coming into the room. You really frightened me. Is something awful going to happen? Hush, whispered Hepsiba. Be cheerful whatever may happen. Be nothing but cheerful. The final pause at the threshold proved so long that Hepsiba, unable to endure the suspense, rushed forward through open the door and led in the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly personage in an old fashioned dressing gown of faded Damasque and wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. It quite overshadowed his forehead except when he thrust it back and stared vaguely about the room. After a brief inspection of his face, it was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such in one as that which slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a child's first journey across the floor had just brought him hitherward. Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free and determined gait. It was the spirit of the man that could not walk. The expression of his countenance while notwithstanding it had the light of reason in it seemed to waver and glimmer and nearly to die away and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame which we see twinkling among half extinguished embers. We gaze at it more intently than if it were a positive blaze gushing vividly upward. More intensely, but with a certain impatience as if it ought either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor or be at once extinguished. For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still, retaining Hepsiba's hand instinctively as a child does that of a grown person who guides it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which indeed, through a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the sunshine. He made a salutation, or to speak nearer the truth, an ill-defined, abortive attempt at courtesy. Imperfect as it was, however, he conveyed an idea, or at least gave a hint, of indescribable grace, such as no practiced art of external manners could have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at this instant, yet as recollected afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man. Dear Clifford, said Hepsiba, in the tone with which one soothes a wayward infant, this is your cousin, Phoebe, little Phoebe Penchin. Arthur's only child, you know. She has come from the country to stay with us awhile. For our old house has grown to be very lonely now. Phoebe, Phoebe Penchin. Phoebe, repeated the guest, with a strange, sluggish, ill-defined utterance. Arthur's child, I forget, no matter, she is very welcome. Come, dear Clifford, take this chair, said Hepsiba, leading him to his place. Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more. Now, let us begin breakfast. The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present scene, and bring it home to his mind with the more satisfactory distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in the low-studded cross-beamed, oak-and-paneled parlor, and not in some other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his place, or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their departure, leaving his wasted gray and melancholy figure, a substantial emptiness, a material ghost, to occupy his seat at table. Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper gleam in his eyeballs. It betoken that his spiritual part had returned and was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire and light up intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed to be a forlorn inhabitant. At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation, Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin Hepsiba's possession. Indeed, with the feminine eye for costume, she had at once identified the damask dressing gown, which enveloped him, as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately represented in the picture. This old faded garment, with all its pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed in some indescribable way to translate the wearer's untold misfortune and make it perceptible to the beholder's eye. It was the better to be discerned by this exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate garments. That form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have suffered some miserable wrong from its earthly experience. There he seemed to sit with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the world, but through which, a flitting intervals might be caught the same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which Malbone, venturing a happy touch with suspended breath, had imparted to the miniature. There had been something so innately characteristic in this look that all the dusky years and the burden of unfit calamity, which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy it. Hepsiba had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee and presented it to her guests. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered and disquieted. Is this you, Hepsiba? He murmured sadly, then more apart and perhaps unconscious that he was overheard. How changed, how changed? And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so? Poor Hepsiba, it was that wretched scow which time in her nearsightedness and the fret of inward discomfort had rendered so habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably invoked it. But at the indistinct murmur of his words, her whole face grew tender and even lovely with sorrowful affection. The harshness of her features disappeared as it were behind the warm and misty glow. Angry, she repeated, angry with you Clifford. Her tone as she uttered the exclamation had a plaintive and really exquisite melody thrilling through it. Yet without subduing a certain something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument which makes its physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony. So deep was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepsiba's voice. There is nothing but love here Clifford, she added. Nothing but love, you are at home. The guest responded to her tone by a smile which did not half light up his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a charm of wonderful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expression or one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mold and outline of his countenance because there was nothing intellectual to temper it. It was a look of appetite. He ate food with what might almost be termed voracity and seemed to forget himself, Hepsiba, the young girl and everything else around him and the sensual enjoyment which the bountifully spread table afforded. And his natural system, though high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of the palette was probably inherent. It would have been kept in check, however, and even converted into an accomplishment and one of the thousand modes of intellectual culture had his more ethereal characteristics retained their vigor. But as it existed now, the effect was painful and made Phoebe drop her eyes. In a little while, the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet untasted coffee. He coiffed it eagerly. The subtle essence acted on him like a charmed draft and caused the opaque substance of his animal being to grow transparent or at least translucent so that a spiritual gleam was transmitted through it with a clearer luster than hitherto. More, more, he cried with nervous haste in his utterance as if anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him. This is what I need, give me more. Under this delicate and powerful influence, he sat more erect and looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested on. It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual. This, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect. Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to present itself in remarkable prominence. But a certain fine temper of being was now not brought out in full relief but changeably and imperfectly betrayed of which it was the function to deal with all beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite taste and an enviable susceptibility of happiness. Beauty would be his life, his aspirations would all tend toward it and allowing his frame in physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments would likewise be beautiful. Such a man should have nothing to do with sorrow, nothing with strife, nothing with the martyrdom which in an infinite variety of shapes awaits those who have the heart and will and conscience to fight a battle with the world. To these heroic tempers, such martyrdom is the richest mead in the world's gift. To the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense and due proportion with the severity of the inflection. He had no right to be a martyr and beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all other purposes, a generous, strong and noble spirit would, me thinks, have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have planned for itself. It would have flung down the hopes so paltry in its regard if thereby the wintry blast of our rude sphere might come tempered to such a man. Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to be a sibirite. It was perceptible even there and the dark old parlor in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization so refined that spiritual ingredients are molded in with it. It was betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose fresh and matingly figure was both sunshine and flowers, their essence in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation. Not less evident was this love and necessity for the beautiful and the instinctive caution with which even so soon his eyes turned away from his hostess and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. It was Hepsiba's misfortune, not Clifford's fault, how could he? So yellow as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mean, with that odd uncouthness of a turban on her head and that most perverse of scowls contorting her brow, how could he love to gaze at her? But did he owe her no affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing. A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of that kind. It is, we say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mold. It is always selfish in its essence and we must give it leave to be so and heap up our heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more without a recompense. Poor Hepsiba knew this truth or at least acted on the instinct of it. So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had been, she rejoiced. Rejoiced, though with the present sigh and a secret purpose to shed tears in her own chamber, that he had brighter objects now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They never possessed a charm and if they had, the canker of her grief for him would long since have destroyed it. The guest leaned back in his chair, mingled in his countenance with a dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest. He was seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him or perhaps dreading it to be a dream or a play of imagination was vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and more durable illusion. How pleasant, how delightful he murmured but not as if addressing anyone. Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open window, an open window. How beautiful that play of sunshine. Those flowers, how very fragrant. That young girl's face, how cheerful, how blooming. A flower with a dew on it and sunbeams in the dew drops. Ah, this must be all a dream, a dream, a dream. But it has quite hidden the four stone walls. Then his face darkened as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had come over it. There was no more light in its expression than might have come through the iron gates of a prison window, still lessening too as if he were sinking farther into the depths. Phoebe, being of that quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained from taking apart and generally a good one in what was going forward, now felt herself moved to address the stranger. Here is a new kind of rose which I found this morning in the garden, said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the vase. There will be but five or six on the bush this season. This is the most perfect of them all, not a speck of blight or mildew in it. And how sweet it is, sweet like no other rose. One can never forget that scent. Ah, let me see, let me hold it, cried the guest, eagerly seizing the flower, which by the spell peculiar to remembered odors brought innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled. Thank you, this has done me good. I remember how I used to prize this flower, long ago I suppose, very long ago. Or was it only yesterday? It makes me feel young again. Am I young? Either this remembrance is singularly distinct or this consciousness strangely dim, but how kind the fair young girl. Thank you. Thank you. The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast table. It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened soon afterwards to rest on the face of the old Puritan who out of his dingy frame and lusterless canvas was looking down on the scene like a ghost and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one. The guest made an impatient gesture of the hand and addressed Hepsaba with what might easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of the family. Hepsaba, Hepsaba, cried he with no little force and distinctness. Why do you keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes, that is precisely your taste. I have told you a thousand times that it was the evil genius of the house. My evil genius particularly. Take it down at once. Dear Clifford, said Hepsaba sadly, you know it cannot be. Then at all events continued he, still speaking with some energy. Pray cover it with the crimson curtain, broad enough to hang and fold and with the golden border and tassels. I cannot bear it. It must not stare me in the face. Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered, said Hepsaba soothingly. There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs, a little fading and moth-eaten, I'm afraid, but Phoebe and I will do wonders with it. This very day remembers, said he, and then added in a low self-communing voice, why should we live in this dismal house at all? Why not go to the south of France, to Italy? Paris, Naples, Venice, Rome. Hepsaba will say we have not the means, a droll idea that. He smiled to himself and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning towards Hepsaba. But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had evidently wearied the stranger. He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as stagnating in a pool around his feet. A slumberous veil diffused itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape. He appeared to become grosser, almost claudish. If ought of interest or beauty, even ruined beauty, had heretofore been visible in this man, the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that visage, and whatever exquisite luster had gleamed in those filmy eyes. Before he had quite sunk in a way, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle of the sharp bell made itself audible. Striking most disagreeably on Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair. Good heavens, Hepsaba, what horrible disturbance have we now in the house? cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience as a matter of course and a custom of old on the one person in the world that loved him. I have never heard such a hateful clamor. Why do you permit it? In the name of all dissonance, what can it be? It was very remarkable into what prominent relief, even as if a dim picture should leap suddenly from its canvas, Clifford's character was thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance. The secret was that an individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart. It is even possible for similar cases have often happened that if Clifford in his foregoing life had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste to its utmost perfect ability, that subtle attribute might before this period have completely eaten out or filed away his affections. Shall we venture to pronounce therefore that his long and black calamity may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom? Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears, said Hepsiba patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame. It is very disagreeable even to me, but do you know Clifford, I have something to tell you. This ugly noise, pray run Phoebe and see who's there.  Shop bell repeated Clifford with the bewildered stare. Yes, our shop bell, said Hepsiba, a certain natural dignity mingled with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner. For you must know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor and there was no other resource but either to accept the systems from a hand that I would push aside and so would you, were it to offer bread when we were dying for it? No help saved from him or else to earn our subsistence with my own hands. Alone I might have been content to starve, but you were to be given back to me. Do you think then, dear Clifford, added she with a wretched smile, that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace on the old house by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our great, great grandfather did the same when there was far less need. Are you ashamed of me? Shame, disgrace, do you speak these words to me, Hepsiba? said Clifford, not angrily, however. For when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only aggrieved emotion. It was not kind to say so, Hepsiba. What shame can befall me now? And then the unnerved man, he that had been born for enjoyment, but had met a doom so very wretched, burst into a woman's passion of tears. It was but a brief continuance, however, soon leaving him in a quiescent and to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From this mood too, he partially rallied for an instant and looked at Hepsiba with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a puzzle to her. Are we so very poor, Hepsiba? said he. Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath, which, however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his character. Hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepsiba seized the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears. Her profoundest spirit sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. And this depth of grief and pity, she felt that there was no irreverence in gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at him, now that he was so changed. And turning hastily away, Hepsiba let down the curtain over the sunny window and left Clifford to slumber there.