Crow, moreover, was seen executing his
world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons were
galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern
cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to
the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our
own fashions than those of a hundred years ago. Another phenomenon,
still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which,
in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their
instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.

In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in
the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
of his commercial speculations?

We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the
projection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow of
the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the
gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.
Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as
if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into
the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the
movement, were really quite startling.

Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busy
herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her gr