asp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There,
again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different
ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old
Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!
As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in
quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more
inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must
needs turn aside and laugh at her. For here,--and if we fail to
impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of
the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that
occur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itself
old gentility. A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the
shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was
that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
bread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain
to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading
closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She
must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of du