But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to ling… - Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.

Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.

Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!