rld, whom this ill-advised ancestor had been the means of bringing
to justice for the crime of witchcraft. Hawthorne apparently found the
idea of the history of the Pyncheons in his own family annals. His
witch-judging ancestor was reported to have incurred a malediction
from one of his victims, in consequence of which the prosperity of the
race faded utterly away. "I know not," the passage I have already
quoted goes on, "whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves
to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties, or whether
they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another
state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, hereby take
shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by
them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of
the race for some time back would argue to exist--may be now and
henceforth removed." The two first American Hathornes had been people
of importance and responsibility; but with the third generation the
family lapsed into an obscurity from which it emerged in the very
person of the writer who begs so gracefully for a turn in its affairs.
It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the Introduction to _The
Scarlet Letter_, that from the original point of view such lustre as
he might have contrived to confer upon the name would have appeared
more than questionable.

"Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have
thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that
after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the family
tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have
borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim
that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable;
no success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope,
had ever been brightened by success, would they deem
otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful.
'What is he?' murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to
the other. 'A writer of story-books! What kind of a business
in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable
to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the
degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!' Such
are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and
myself across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me
as they will, strong traits of their nature h