The House of The Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 1 Page 44

likewise the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death — for so it was adjudged — of one member of the family by the criminal act of another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly — an argument of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a monarchy, — the high respectability and political influence of the criminal’s connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to perpetual imprisonment.

This sad affair had chanced about thirty years before the action of our