fourscore years of age, or perhaps nearer a hundred, was still in
its strong and broad maturity, throwing its shadow from side to
side of the street, overtopping the seven gables, and sweeping the
whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It gave beauty to the
old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature. The street
having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable was
now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous
wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen
a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building,
an enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an
exaggeration to say, two or three feet long. Behind the house
there appeared to be a garden, which undoubtedly had once been
extensive, but was now infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut
in by habitations and outbuildings that stood on another street.
It would be an omission, trifling, indeed, but unpardonable,
were we to forget the green moss that had long since gathered
over the projections of the windows, and on the slopes of the
roof nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye to a crop, not
of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in the air,
not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of the
gables. They were called Alice's Posies. The tradition was, that
a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that
the dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed
a kind of soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had
long been in her grave. However the flowers might have come there,
it was both sad and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself
this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon
family; and how the even-returning summer did her best to gladden
it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort.