descendant speaks of were reproduced in his son John, who bore the
title of Colonel, and who was connected, too intimately for his
honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the
persecution of-the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is
introduced into the little drama entitled _The Salem Farms_ in
Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_. I know not whether he had the
compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks of him, in
the continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having made
himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their
blood may be said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain,
indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones
in the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have
not crumbled utterly to dust." Readers of _The House of the Seven
Gables_ will remember that the story concerns itself with a family
which is supposed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against one
of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the
world, 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