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"It is the same!" said he.

"And who are you that know it?" asked Redclyffe, surprised.

"He whose ancestors taught him the secret,--who has had it handed down to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the necessity of making it known."

"You are the heir!" said Redclyffe.

In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out like a lustre at the close of day.

APPENDIX

CHAPTER I.

_Note 1._ The MS. gives the following alternative openings: "Early in the present century"; "Soon after the Revolution"; "Many years ago."

_Note 2._ Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is called "Ormskirk," and in an earlier draft of this portion of the romance, "Etheredge."

_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and negro."

_Note 4. Author's note_.--"It is understood from the first that the children are not brother and sister.--Describe the children with really childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.--The Doctor should occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction."

_Note 5._ In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same, I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the earlier draft: "The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody's business centres there at one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth about the country churches,--the little Norman, square, battlemented stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of strength and courage for him;--all these, mingled with succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with the sexton's spade; until every blade of grass was human more than vegetable,--for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor's art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled, surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark, high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being haunted."

_Note 6. Author's note_.--"The spiders are affected by the weather and serve as barometers.--It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous."

_Note 7. Author's note_.--"The townspeople are at war with the Doctor.--Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.--The result of Crusty Hannah's strangely mixed breed should be shown in some strange way.--Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized in the street scenes."

CHAPTER II.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Read the whole paragraph before copying any of it."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious needlework, etc."

_Note 3._ These two children are described as follows in an early note of the author's: "The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most evident place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very remarkable,--the most intelligent and expressive face that can be conceived, changing in those early years like an April day, and beautiful in all its changes; dark, but of a soft expression, kindling, melting, glowing, laughing; a varied intelligence, which it was as good as a book to read. He was quick in all modes of mental exercise; quick and strong, too, in sensibility; proud, and gifted (probably by the circumstances in which he was placed) with an energy which the softness and impressibility of his nature needed.--As for the little girl, all the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his cobwebs."--All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his characters in the mood of the "Twice-Told Tales," and then by meditation solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance."