Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.
That is the opening paragraph to the novel of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I should read this. My wife purchased the novel while in Salem, which she had not read either. But, it remained a priority stop on our autumn visit to Salem, Massachusetts. Nathaniel Hawthorne cousin, Susanna Ingersoll, owned the property at one time.
