Colonel's ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County
was still an unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had
put down woods, lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces,
and dotted the villages and towns, and calculated the progressively
increasing value of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of
its ultimately forming a princedom for themselves.

In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be
some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the
hard, keen sense, and practical energy, that had so remarkably
distinguished the original founder. His character, indeed, might
be traced all the way down, as distinctly as if the Colonel himself,
a little diluted, had been gifted with a sort of intermittent
immortality on earth. At two or three epochs, when the fortunes
of the family were low, this representative of hereditary qualities
had made his appearance, and caused the traditionary gossips of
the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is the old Pyncheon
come again! Now the Seven Gables will be new-shingled!" From father
to son, they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of
home attachment. For various reasons, however, and from impressions
often too vaguely founded to be put on paper, the writer cherishes
the belief that many, if not most, of the successive proprietors of
this estate were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to
hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no question; but old
Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward from his own age
to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the way, on the
conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of the
awful query, whether each inheritor of the property-conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great
guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities.