anner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent. The
ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms
were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild
story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
Maule had been.

Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule's eye. Some said that he could look into
people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.

After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as tha