with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the
theme. With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances
amid which the foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid
glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent
east wind,--pointing, too, here and there, at some spot of more
verdant mossiness on its roof and walls,--we shall commence the
real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the
present day. Still, there will be a connection with the long
past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to
manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete
--which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve
to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the
freshest novelty of human life. Hence, too, might be drawn a
weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of
the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce
good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with
the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term
expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring
growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not
the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same
spot of ground. 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. A natural spring of
soft and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula
where the Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew
Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although
somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village.