International Cinema Festival of India

Low-Priced Furniture deals makes me think of the family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the inherent instability of human affairs.

It might fairly be anticipated that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their prosperity, than wear away and destroy it.

It was considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel Pyncheon’s picture–in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his will–remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died.

The sudden death of a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar to what have been related of the Colonel’s exit, was held as giving additional probability to the received opinion on this topic.

But the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar period.

So far as the prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon. His son lacked not merely the father’s eminent position, but the talent and force of character to achieve it: he could, therefore, effect nothing by dint of political interest; and the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent, after the Colonel’s decease, as it had been pronounced in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.

Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took the general characteristics of the little community in which they dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals, and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost anywhere else.

These last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea of any man’s asserting a right–on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and forgotten–to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil.

This impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance, which all along characterized the Pyncheons.

No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition. It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a matter of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheon’s claim were not unduly stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of Matthew Maule.

But there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than their relatives,–they may even cherish dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death, the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of disease.

Their exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime.

It was a death that blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.

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