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Updated: May 25, 2025
The life of the little back street, as it revives in Clifford's childishly pleased senses, with its succession of morning carts, its scissor-grinder, and other incidents of the hour; the garden of flowers and vegetables, with the Sunday afternoon in the ruinous arbor, the loaf of bread and the china bowl of currants; the life of the immortal cent-shop, with its queer array, and its string of customers jingling the bell; the hens, evidently transported from the great coop of the Berkshire cottage, but with the value of an event in the novel, all these things, with a hundred other features that are each but a trifle, make up a glamour of reality that grows over the whole book like the mosses on the house.
Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall, and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire, and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!
"And how do you know they're gone to the Judge's?" asked Mrs. Gubbins. "He's a rich man; and there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah this many a day, because he won't give her a living. That's the main reason of her setting up a cent-shop." "I know that well enough," said the neighbor. "But they're gone, that's one thing certain.
She tried it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her. "The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" muttered the irascible housewife. "Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk's airs, I suppose! But I'll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!"
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off. "Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay. Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand, reckoning her share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's, and some say twice as much!
"These sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well what they are about. But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much. This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."
And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the cent-shop, and the Judge's pocket-book being well filled, and bad blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what they make!" "Hush, hush!" whispered the other. "It seems like a sin to be the first to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had better go to the city marshal." "Yes, yes!" said Dixey. "Well!
Another minor coincidence, and yet proper to be noted, is that of the laboring-man Dixey, who appears in the opening of the story with some comments upon Aunt Hepzibah's scheme of the cent-shop, and only comes in once afterward, at the close, to touch upon the subject in a different strain.
Now, in that very house, to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop. This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse.
At first, unseen, but overheard by Miss Pyncheon, he prophesies to a companion, "in a tone as if he were shaking his head," that the cent-shop will fail; and when Clifford and Hepzibah drive off in their carriage, at the end, he remarks sagaciously, "Good business, good business."
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