e was a fable . . . typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the lady got her death-blow in the honey-moon, and cruelty: "There was a fable, never smiled again, because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee, every morning, at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master" (Hawthorne 193-4). Like, the Colonel, the Judge "was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong" (Hawthorne 194). The Judge of high public rectitude turns out to have been, "in his youth, an apparently irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and recklessly ex
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