the very words. "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger,
with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,
--"God will give him blood to drink!" After the reputed wizard's
death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel
Pyncheon's grasp. When it was understood, however, that the
Colonel intended to erect a family mansion-spacious, ponderously
framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations
of his posterity over the spot first covered by the log-built hut
of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the
village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether
the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity
throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over
an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead
and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter
a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers
into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where
children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and
ugliness of Maule's crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment,
would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early
with the scent of an old and melancholy house. Why, then, --while
so much of the soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest
leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had
already been accurst?

But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned
aside from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the
wizard's ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however
specious. Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him
somewhat; but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own