In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne concealed a short story which details the persecution and execution of Hepzibah Pyncheon as a witch. This execution story is broken into paragraphs, sentences, and phrases, and scattered into the text of the ongoing romance plot line. These scattered pieces are re-assembled here.

Hawthorne very carefully builds up a demonic aura about Hepzibah: "...she expected to minister to the wants of the community, unseen, like a disembodied divinity, or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential and awe-stricken purchaser, in an invisible hand.... She now issued forth, as would appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over an enchanted beauty." Uncle Venner is described as "a kind of familiar of the house." The word familiar signifies the companion of a witch -- usually a black cat or, in medieval lore, a goat.

Hepzibah's master, Satan, calls her: "She was suddenly startled by the tinkling alarum -- high, sharp, and irregular -- of a little bell. The maiden lady arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience." This "ugly and spiteful little din" betrays the advent of Satan:

But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be attached to the same steel-spring; for it went through a series of sharp jerks, in unison with the sound. The door was thrust open, although no human form was perceptible on the other side of the half-window. Hepzibah, nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit and were afraid, yet resolved, to hazard the encounter.

"Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally. "Now is my hour of need!"

Hepzibah has "a sense of inevitable doom" about her nearsighted frown, or scowl, for good reason. This "scowl -- a strange contortion of the brow -- which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will" has "done Miss Hepzibah a very ill-office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid... The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling on them." Moreover, in "her great life-trial ... the testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important."

The laboring man Dixey testifies against her in his rough voice, "Why, her face -- I've seen it; for I dug her garden for her, one year -- her face is enough to frighten Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a mind to trade with her. People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper!" One Mrs. Gubbins also condemns Hepzibah. Hawthorne describes this demonic neighbor: "there came a fat woman.... Her face glowed with fire-heat; and, it being a pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own corpulent velocity." She angrily jarred and outraged the shop bell, muttered, "The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" and "took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath...."

Judge Pyncheon tells Hepzibah that he has arranged to have Clifford's "deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked" -- in order to persecute him more effectively. "The butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, some of the customers of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the secrets of your interior." When both Clifford and the Judge die, these eyewitnesses will turn their accusations on Hepzibah. She is accused specifically of the murder of Jaffrey Pyncheon, since the Judge died in her parlor. The "good lady on the opposite side of the street" will be there at the trial to explain that "...there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah, this many a day, because he won't give her a living. That's the main reason of her setting up a cent-shop." Dixey will be there to implicate Clifford in the murder as well: "A certain cousin of his may have been at his old tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the cent-shop -- and the Judge's pocket-book being well-filled -- and bad blood amongst them already! Put all these things together, and see what they make!"

As one of the Judge's spies, the butcher assaults the House of the Seven Gables, prying about "every accessible door" and the window in his attempts to get a glimpse of Clifford. He sees the Judge himself sitting in the parlor -- dead -- and thinks that it is Clifford, whom he curses as "Old Maid Pyncheon's bloody brother." Hawthorne's literary duplicity here convinces the careless reader that the butcher's assault is motivated by a desire to please Hepzibah with "his sweetbread of lamb." The truth is, Clifford is the lamb sacrificed to the butcher's greed.

"The Flight of Two Owls" is filled with allusions to death and mortality. It records Hepzibah's sensations on her way to the place of execution and to that "gimlet-eyed" gentleman who will take her life. This acerbic old conservative thinks that the newly invented telegraph is a great thing, "particularly as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers..." Hawthorne gives him the gimlet eye, which traditionally could bore into a person to cause paralysis or death. There was "...a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body," and "...the wretched consciousness of being adrift. She had lost the faculty of self-guidance..." As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly hovering roundabout her, and so diffusing itself into her system that one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other...." She whispered to herself, again and again -- "Am I awake? -- Am I awake?" And "...the bell rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which life vouchsafes to us, in its hurried career.... At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift through the main-body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the top of the square tower." Hepzibah Pyncheon was to die as a witch on a place called Gallows Hill in Salem.

The final scene is a deliberate parallel to the execution of Matthew Maule at the beginning of The House of the Seven Gables. But Hepzibah does not curse any of the Pyncheons. Still, it is very hard for Hepzibah to pray: "...she lifted her eyes -- scowling, poor, dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven! -- and strove hard to send up a prayer through the dense, gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, and chill indifference.... Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart." Hepzibah's prayer on the isolated railroad platform at the end of the familiar version of "The Flight of Two Owls" is, in reality, her final petition:

She knelt down upon the platform where they were standing, and lifted her clasped hands to the sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no hour for disbelief; -- no juncture this, to question that there was a sky above, and an Almighty Father looking down from it!

"Oh, God!" -- ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah -- then paused a moment, to consider what her prayer should be -- "Oh, God -- our Father -- are we not thy children? Have mercy on us!" Then "the signal was given;" and suffering "short, quick breaths," ... "With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath the burden... Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but only ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth."

Here Hepzibah suffers the execution by peine fort et dure, pressing to death under planks with stones piled increasingly on until the ribs break and death ensues. At Salem in 1692, one Giles Corey refused to plead guilty or not--in order to save his property for his widow--and was tortured this way for three days until he called for "More weight! More Weight!" to break his ribs to end it.

The best approach is to read the entire book The House of the Seven Gables again, aware that there is this concealed narrative within. The quotes reassembled here may be found in The House of the Seven Gables, Vol. 2 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude Simpson (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1965), on pages 33-4, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48-9, 126, 223-4, 236, 245, 253, 255, 256, 264, 266, 267, 288-9, 291-2, 296.

This concealed narrative caused the logical line of the apparent narrative to lurch at times, and there is the occasional strange juxtaposition of sentences. But Hawthorne is so skilled in anticipating his readers' expectations, that his true intent remains hidden.