ground. Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks
of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with
iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without
so much as imagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy,
or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him,
the Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable.
He therefore dug his cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his
mansion, on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years
before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was a curious,
and, as some people thought, an ominous fact, that, very soon after
the workmen began their operations, the spring of water, above
mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality.
Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar,
or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain
that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued to be called,
grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old
woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead
gripe the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he
was the best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought
it expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly
to cast aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist.
Nor was it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so