And supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer
mode of expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they
inherited a great misfortune, than the reverse?

We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down
the history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection
with the House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic
picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the
venerable house itself. As regards its interior life, a large,
dim looking-glass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled
to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been
reflected there,--the old Colonel himself, and his many descendants,
some in the garb of antique babyhood, and others in the bloom of
feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened with the wrinkles of
frosty age. Had we the secret of that mirror, we would gladly sit
down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page. But there
was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation,
that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the
mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have
been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region
all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves
to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing
over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest
sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy
with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule;
the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold was remembered,
with the very important addition, that it had become a part of the
Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle in his
throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between jest
and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!" The sudden death of a