Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stem rigidity of purpose, as with iron camps, he followed
out his original design probably without so much as imagining an objection to it on the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which a finer
sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his cellar, and laid the
deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It
was a curious, and, as some people thought, an ominous fact that, very soon after the workmen began their operations, the spring of water,
above mentioned entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality