between
jest and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!" The sudden death of
a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the Colonel's exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was
considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
Pyncheon's picture--in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
will--remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those
stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and
so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of
the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.

The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death--for
so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly--an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have