ould express something far brighter than this doubtful
perception, or sense, rather, that there is a window there. Has it yet
vanished? No!--yes!--not quite! And there is still the swarthy
whiteness--we shall venture to marry these ill-agreeing words--the
swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone:
there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There
is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has
annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us;
and we, adrift in chaos, may harken to the gusts of homeless wind,
that go sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what was once a
world!

[Footnote 79: From Chapter XVIII of "The House of the Seven Gables."
Published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]

Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.

But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder; it had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and,
taking hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a
shake, like a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist.
Another and another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks
again, and makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in
its sooty throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly
in complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and
a half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fireboard. A door has slammed above stairs. A
window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an unruly
gust. It is not to be conceived, beforehand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber--and to tread along the