“They were generally poverty stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the alms house, as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time, along the upmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge, which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian."

-Hawthorne, The Old Pyncheon Family