“That very singular man, old Dr. Heidegger, once invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study. […] They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.”

Dr. Heidegger is described as “very singular.” He is evidently a man of science, but science in Hawthorne’s story is mixed with the magical (Dr. Heidegger has a book of spells) and tinged with the sinister (his young bride-to-be died from drinking one of his potions). Some critics have suggested that the character should be viewed in the tradition of Doctor Faustus.

“Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame, or at least had been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of infamous.”

The narrator gives background on the three old men, describing how their misfortunes played out. Medbourne was ruined by the pursuit of money, Killigrew by the pursuit of pleasure, and Gascoigne by the pursuit of fame—a classical triumvirate of temptations. Now, in their old age, they live with the consequences.

“As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her.”

The Widow Wycherly, like the three men, has a checkered past, although it is only discreetly referred to as “certain scandalous stories” that people tell about her. As a result, she has lived for many years in deep seclusion. The Widow Wycherly resembles Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, who also lived apart from town on account of the shame meted out to her from townsfolk for her past.