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Face Your Life Niall Power
The Old Pyncheon Family: The House of the Seven Gables is a rusty, wooden house halfway down Pyncheon Street in a New England town. The house, also known as Pyncheon House, has a long and weighty history. It was not the first house in its location; when Pyncheon Street was once Maule's Lane, there was a small hut built in that place because of its proximity to a natural spring. Colonel Pyncheon, however, a prominent person of the town, insisted on his claim to that property when it became more desirable, and engaged in a bitter dispute with the hut's owner, Matthew Maule, a relatively obscure man generally regarded as a wizard. Personal influence proved more important than right of ownership, and Matthew Maule was executed for the crime of witchcraft. One of the most vocal supporters of his witchcraft trial was none other than Colonel Pyncheon. Colonel Pyncheon built a family mansion there, and upon its construction the spring became polluted. The house was imposing, striking awe into anyone who saw it. Pyncheon retreated into the house, refusing visits from even the lieutenant-governor, who was forced to bang on the door with his sword to no effect. The lieutenant-governor and his entourage finally forced their way into the house, where they found Pyncheon dead. His appearance indicated violence: there were marks on his throat and the print of a bloody hand on his ruff. They concluded that a man had climbed through Pyncheon's lattice-window. The lieutenant-governor claimed to see a skeleton hand at the Colonel's throat that vanished away. John Swinnerton, a doctor, claimed that Pyncheon died of apoplexy. During his funeral, Reverend Higginson claimed that even without Colonel Pyncheon, his family seemed destined to a permanent high place in society. However, Pyncheon's son lacked his father's eminent position and force of character. The Pyncheons had an absurd delusion of family importance, but in almost every generation there happened to be one descendant that recalled Colonel Pyncheon, and this person invariably caused people to wonder whether the Pyncheon family would experience a renaissance. Most of these descendants were troubled by owning the House of the Seven Gables; they wondered whether, since they knew of the wrong by which it was obtained, they were committing the same sin anew. Since Colonel Pyncheon, the Pyncheons were notable in only one instance, when one member of the family was convicted for murdering another. This occurred thirty years before the action of the novel. The victim of the murder was an old bachelor who had concluded that Matthew Maule had been foully wronged out of his homestead and life. This bachelor wished to make restitution to Maule's posterity, and might have even given up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule. Upon his death, the house passed to his nephew, the cousin of the man convicted of murder. The new heir showed more of the Colonel Pyncheon quality than any of his family since the time of the Puritans. He was a politician and later a judge. There were few other Pyncheons left, including a seventeen year old girl, the convicted murderer and his sister, and the judge's son, who was traveling in Europe. Matthew Maule's posterity seemed to be extinct. They were poverty-stricken, and likely did not know the wrong that had been done so many years before. The House of the Seven Gables itself was like a great human heart with a life of its own, full of rich remembrances. A green moss of flower shrubs called Alice's Posies (after an Alice Pyncheon) had grown upon one of the gables. In the front gable there was a shop door that had once contained a small store.
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