"Halfway down a bystreet 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." Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic classic, The House of The Seven Gables, combines my favorite storytelling elements and reads like a Dickens or Hardy novel. And it warns: Beware of the Sins of Your Forefathers

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