tre should
symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.

There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.

"Three o'clock!" said he to himself. "My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death. How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"

It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the
carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very site,
beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds. So young Maule went
straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.

Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.

"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat. "Anybody think he beat on the door with
his biggest hammer!"

"Here I am!" said Maule sternly. "Show me the way to your master's
parlor."

As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been d