e.
Summer or winter, there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
somebody as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use? Upon my word,
Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean
to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But
you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never need go there! Something
still better will turn up for you. I'm sure of it!"

Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached
an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
intervene in her favor. For example, an uncle--who had sailed for
India fifty years before, and never been heard of since--might yet
return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and
decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls
and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable
riches. Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English
branch of the family,--with which the elder stock, on this side of the
Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
centuries,--this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the
ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her
kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But, for reasons the most imperative, she
could not yield to his request. It was more probable, therefore, that
the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some
past generation, and became a great planter there,--hearing of
Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of
character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New
England blood,--would se