heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the Pyncheons, — stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with them, — now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood.

The whole seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little, save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford, and herself, — they three together, — were on the point of adding another incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest.