ancestor the colonel, that intimate relationship between the
present and the past in the way of ancestry and descent, which
historians so carefully overlook." Here, as in "The Scarlet
Letter," Hawthorne is unsparing in his analysis of the meaning
of early American Puritanism--its intolerance and its
strength.


_I.--The Old Pyncheon Family_


Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely-peaked gables, and a huge clustered
chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the
old Pyncheon House; and an elm tree before the door is known as the
Pyncheon elm.

Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of Maule's Lane,
from the name of the original occupant of the soil, before whose cottage
door it was a cow-path. In the growth of the town, however, after some
thirty or forty years, the site covered by the rude hovel of Matthew
Maule (originally remote from the centre of the earlier village) had
become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a prominent personage, who
asserted claims to the land on the strength of a grant from the
Legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the claimant, was a man of iron energy of
purpose. Matthew Maule, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the
defense of what he considered his right. The dispute remained for years
undecided, and came to a close only with the death of old Matthew Maule,
who was executed for the crime of witchcraft.