It was remembered afterwards how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in
the general cry to purge the land from witchcraft, and had sought
zealously the condemnation of Matthew Maule. At the moment of
execution--with the halter about his neck, and while Colonel Pyncheon
sat on horseback grimly gazing at the scene--Maule had addressed him
from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy. "God," said the dying man,
pointing his finger at the countenance of his enemy, "God will give him
blood to drink!"

When it was understood that Colonel Pyncheon intended to erect a
spacious family mansion on the spot first covered by the log-built hut
of Matthew Maule the village gossips shook their heads, and hinted that
he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave.

But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his scheme by dread of the reputed wizzard's ghost. He dug his
cellar, and laid deep the foundations of his mansion; and the
head-carpenter of the House of the Seven Gables was no other than Thomas
Maule, the son of the dead man from whom the right to the soil had been
wrested.

On the day the house was finished Colonel Pyncheon bade all the town to
be his guests, and Maude's Lane--or Pyncheon Street, as it was now
called--was thronged at the appointed hour as with a congregation on its
way to church.

But the founder of the stately mansion did not stand in his own hall to
welcome the eminent persons who presented themselves in honour of the
solemn festival, and the principal domestic had to explain that his
master still remained in his study, which he had entered an hour before.