young men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened with winters, — they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one, that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the Judge’s New England forefathers — he whose picture still hung upon the wall — had given a dead man’s silent and stern reception to the throng of distinguished guests.

From that hour of evil omen until the present, it may be, — though we know not the secret of his heart, — but it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he had thus fortified