Hawthorne begins _The House of the Seven Gables_ as follows:--
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. On my occasional visits
to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon street, for
the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities,--the
great elm tree and the weather-beaten edifice.
Later he gives a detailed description of the house on the morning of its
completion as follows:--
Maule's lane, or Pyncheon street, as it were now more decorous to call it,
was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to
church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice,
which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind.
There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in
pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint
figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or
stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of
glass, with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread.
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