her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness,
she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a
shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the
heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement
of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or
sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all
the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might
hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an
immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is
called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere
of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which
are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.



III The First Customer



MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her
hands over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the
heart which most persons have experienced, when the image of hope
itself seems ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise
at once doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the
tinkling alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell.
The maiden lady arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow;
for she was an enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she
owed obedience. This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,
--being fastened over the shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate
by means of a steel spring, and thus convey notice to the inner regions