age,--how could she ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar,
keen, busy, hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars on her
little outlay! Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the
hope of it as a wild hallucination.

Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing
the great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many
and so magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops,
drygoods stores, with their immense panes of plate-glass, their
gorgeous fixtures, their vast and complete assortments of
merchandise, in which fortunes had been invested; and those
noble mirrors at the farther end of each establishment, doubling
all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista of unrealities! On
one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a multitude of
perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House
of the Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its
projecting story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black
silk, behind the counter, scowling at the world as it went by!
This mighty contrast thrust itself forward as a fair expression
of the odds against which she was to begin her struggle for a
subsistence. Success? Preposterous! She would never think of it
again! The house might just as well be buried in an eternal fog
while all other houses had the sunshine on them; for not a foot
would ever cross the threshold, nor a hand so much as try the door!

But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled
as if it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be
attached to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of