Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 15, 2025
A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse; like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when once overcome.
"Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!" "And so he has" replied Uncle Venner. "And that's rather remarkable in a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting close to them.
Through dreary years Hepzibah had looked forward for the most part despairingly, never with any confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her brightest possibility to the very position in which she now found herself.
After sixty years of idleness and seclusion, she must earn her bread or starve, and to keep shop was the only resource open to her. The first customer to cross the threshold was a young man to whom old Hepzibah let certain remote rooms in the House of the Seven Gables. He explained that he had looked in to offer his best wishes, and to see if he could give any assistance.
Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness? Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude. Now let him try society, the society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends. Let me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good effect of the interview." "You cannot see him," answered Hepzibah. "Clifford has kept his bed since yesterday." "What! How!
But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah; for the good lady's manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly laughter.
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to his hands! Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely water-girdled.
The "instantaneous rush of several guardian angels" that once stood dear old Hepzibah Pynchon in good stead was wanting here, or perhaps they stood by all-invisible, their calm eyes softened with love deeper than tears, at this spectacle so ludicrous to man, beholding in the grotesque dress and adornments only the budding of life's divinest blossom, and in the strange skips and hops of her first attempts at dancing only the buoyancy of those inner wings that goodness and generosity and pure self-devotion were shaping for a future strong and stately flight upward.
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe! But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes?
In the number of domestic animals he swallowed that day he equalled the little boy in Hawthorne's story of "The House of the Seven Gables," who devoured a ginger-bread caravan of camels and elephants purchased at Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon's shop. Our Christmas dinner consisted almost wholly of such vegetables as we proposed to raise in the coming summer.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking