is our own fault, not that of the theme, here is one of the truest
points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It was
the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A lady--who
had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic
reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils
itself irremediably by doing aught for bread,--this born lady,
after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from
her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her
heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn
her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us behold,
in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady--two hundred years old, on this
side of the water, and thrice as many on the other, --with her antique
portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions, and her
claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the eastward,
no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,--born, too, in
Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
where she has spent all her days, --reduced. Now, in that very house,