 CHAPTER II THE MARKET PLACE The grass plot before the jail and prison lane on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped Okendor. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have argued some awful business in hand. It could have been token nothing short of an anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. In that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant or an undutiful child whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idol or vagrant Indian whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter and tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which in our days would infer a degree of mocking, infamy, and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself. It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning, when our story begins its course, that the women of whom there were several in the crowd, appear to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal inflection might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement than any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale, from stepping forth into the public ways and wedging their not-so-unsubstantial bodies, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations. For throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briever beauty, and a slighter physical frame. If not character of less force and solidity than her own, the women who were now standing about the prison door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her country women, and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks that had ripened in the far-off island and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or towards volume of tone. Good wives, said a hard-featured dame of fifty, I'll tell ye a piece of my mind, it would be greatly. For the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church members in good repute, should have the handling of such a mal-factus as this hester-prin, what think ye gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment for us five, what are now here in a not together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worstful magistrates have awarded? Mary, I tro not. People say, said another, that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation. The magistrates are good-fearing gentlemen, but merciful, moreover much, that is a truth, added a third autumnal matron. At the very least they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester-prin's forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warn me. But she, the naughty baggage, little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown. Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever. Ah, but, interposed more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, let her cover the marks as she will, the pain of it will be always in her heart. What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown or the flesh of her forehead, cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most piteous, pitiless of these. Self-constituted judges, this woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly there is. Both in the scripture and the statute book, then let the magistrates who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray. Mercy on us, good wife, exclaimed a man in the crowd. Is there no virtue in women, save that springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet. Hush now, gossips for the lock is turning in the prison door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself. The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of the town beetle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage, prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman whom he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the prison door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the two vivid light of day, because of its existence, heretofore, had brought its quaintans only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison. When the young woman, the mother of this child, stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom, not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and was so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and which was of a splendor in accordance with the state of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony. The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days, characterized by a certain state of dignity, rather than by the delicate evanescence and indescribable grace which is now recognized as its indication, and never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which indeed she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and had molded much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity, but the point, which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer, so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they had beheld her for the first time, was the scarlet letter so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom, it had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself. She had good skill at her needle, that's certain, remarked one of her female spectators, but did ever a woman before this brazen hussy contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the face of our codley magistrates and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment? It were well, muttered the most iron visaged of the old dames, if we stripped Madame Hester's rich gown on her dainty shoulders, and as for the red letter, which she had stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel to that, to make a fitter one. Oh, peace, neighbor's peace, whispered their youngest companion, do not let her hear you, not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart. The grim beetle now made a gesture with his staff, make way, good people, make way in the king's name, cried he, open a passage, and I promise you, Mistress Paine shall be set where man, woman and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour past meridian, a blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine. Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the marketplace. Elaine was forthwith opened to the crowd of spectators, proceeded by the beetle and attended by an irregular procession of stern brown men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Paine set forth toward the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half holiday ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominous letter on her breast. It was no great distance in those days from the prison door to the marketplace, measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length. For haughty as her demeanor was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those thronged to see her. As if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pain that rankles afterward. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Paine passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold at the western extremity of the marketplace. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there. In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held in the old time to be an effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory, and above it rose the framework that the instrument of discipline so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in the contravence of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, me thinks, against our common nature, whether it be the delinquencies of the individual, no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame, as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Paine's instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the pronust to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude at about the height of a man's shoulders above the street. Had there been a papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman so picturesque in her attire and mean, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of divine maternity. Which so many, illustrious painters, have vied with one another to represent, something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne. The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile instead of shuddering at it. The witnesses of Hester Prince's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the governor, and several of his counselors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house looking down upon the platform. When such a personages could constitute a part of the spectacle without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have been earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was somber and grave, the unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom, it was almost intolerable to be born. Of an impulsive and passionate nature she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, weakening itself in every variety of insult. But there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude, each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child contributing their individual parts, Hester Pren might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But under the leaden infliction, which it was her doom to endure, she felt at moments as if she must need shriek out with the full power of her lungs and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once. That there were intervals when the whole scene in which she was the most conspicuous object seemed to vanish from her eyes, or at least glimmered indistinctly before them, like a massive imperfectly shaped and spectral images, her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly human street of a little town on the edge of the Western wilderness, other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats, reminiscences most trifling and passages of infancy in school days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life, one picture precisely as vivid as another, as if all were of similar importance, or all alike, a play. Possibly it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibitions of these phantasmagoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village in Old England and her paternal home, a decayed house of grey stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect but retaining a half obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with its bold brow and revered white beard that flowed over the old fashion to lesbethian rough, her mother's too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which had always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been want to gaze at. There she beheld another countenance of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pour over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange penetrating power when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in her memory's picture gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall grey houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture of a continental city where new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar, a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in one of these shifting scenes, came back the rude marketplace of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and leveling their stern regards at Hester Prynne, yes, at herself, who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread upon her bosom. Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that it sent forth a cry. She turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes, these were her realities. All else had vanished. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Othorn Chapter 3 The Recognition From this intense consciousness, aving the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at last relieved by discerning an outskirt of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native car, was standing there. But red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements that one of them would have attracted any notice from as their prime at such a time. Much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from our mind. By the Indian's sight, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume. He was small in stature, with a furred visage, which as yet could hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mob physical to itself and become manifest by unmistakable chokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavored to conceal or abate the peculiarity. It was sufficiently evident as a prime that one of these men's shoulder rules higher than the other. Again, at first instant of perceiving that thin visage and slight formative figure, she pressed her infant to a bosom with so convulsible force that poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But mother did not seem to hear it. At his arrival in the marketplace, and some time before she saw him, distrusioner had bent his eyes on her surprise. It was careless at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and importance, unless he were relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A roughing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them and making one little pause, with all its redded interventions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he saw instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of Esso Prime fastening on his own and saw that he appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips. Then, touching the shoulder of a talisman who stood near to him, he addressed him in a formal and courteous manner. I pray you, good sir, said he. Who is this woman? And wherefore is she here set up to public shame? You must need to be a stranger in this region, friend. Answered the talisman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion. Else you'd surely have heard of Mr. Esso Prime and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in Gollymaster Dimmesdale's church. You say it truly, replied the other. I am a stranger, and have been a wonderer sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the eth and folk of the southward, and am now wrought hithered by this Indian to be redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Esso Prime's, if I have her name rightly, of these woman's offenses, and what was brought her to Yandere Scaffold? Truly, friend, and me think it must gladden your heart after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness. Said the talisman. To find yourself at length in a land where iniquities search out and punish inside of rulers and people, as here in our godly New England. Yandere woman, sir, you must know, was wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam, when some good time had gone, he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Mary, good sir, in some two years or less, then the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come from this learned gentleman, Master Prime. And his young wife, Luke Yu, being left her own misguidance. Ha, ha, I conceive you, said stranger with a bitter smile. So learned the man as you speak of should have learned this, too, in his books. And who, by your favor, sir, may be the father of Yandere babe. It is some three or four months old, I should judge, which Mr. Prime is holding in her arms. Of a truth friend, that mirror remains a riddle, and Daniel, who shall expound it, is yet a wanting. Answered the townsman. Mother Esther absolutely refused to speak, and magistrates have laid their heads together in vain. Per adventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, a known of man, and forgetting that God sees him. The learned man, absurd stranger with another smile. Should come himself to look into the mystery. It behoves him well if he be still in life. Responded the townsman. Now, good sir, our master such as magistracy, the thinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and out with a strongly tempted to her fall, and that, moreover, as it most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of a righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have done Mr. Prime stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for a reminder of her natural life, to her a mark of shame upon her bosom. A wise sentence, remarked stranger gravely, bowing his head. Thus, she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter being graved upon her tombstones. It irks me, nevertheless, that partner of her iniquity should not at least stand uncaful by her side. But he will be known. He will be known. He will be known. He vowed courageously to the communicative townsman, and which bring a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the prowl. While they passed, as Mr. Prime had been standing on her pedestal, still in a fixed gaze towards stranger. So fixed a gaze that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than ever to meet him as she now did, with hot midday sun burning down upon her face, enlightening up its shame. With scarlet choking of infamy on her breast, with sin-born infant in her arms, with whole people drawn forth as to a vestibule, setting a feature that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of fireside, in happy shadow of a home or beneath a matronly veiled church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It was buried stand thus, with so many between him and her, then to meet him face to face, they too alone. She fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when his protection should be withdrawn from her. Involving this thought, she scarcely heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude. Her canon to me, as Mr. Prime, said the voice. It was already be noticed that directly over the platform on which Esther Prime stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to the meeting-house. It was a place where his proclamations were on to be made, amidst an assemblies of the magistracy, with old ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene in which we are describing, said Governor Bellingham himself, with four sergeants about his chair, bearing all birds, as a guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his head, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath. Gentleman advancing ears, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill-fitted to be the head and the representative of a community which owned its origins and progress, and its present state of development, not only in post of youth, but at stone and tempered energy of manhood, and some sagacity of age, accomplishing so much precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was surrounded, were extinguished by a dignity of men, belonging to a period when forms of authority were felt to possess sacredness of divine institutions. They were doubtless good men, just and sage, but, out of the old human family, it would not have been easy to select same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an earing woman's heart, untisentangling its mesh of good and evil, than say the richest aspect towards whom, as her prime, now turned her face. She seemed conscious indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect, laying large on the normal heart of the multitude. For, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew paled and trembled. The voice which had called her attentions was that of the reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and with all the men of kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a mere shame than self-congratulation with him. There is, too, with the border of grizz locks beneath his skull cap, while his grey eyes, a caution to its shaded lights of study, were winking, like those of Esther's infant, in the unadulterate sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portrait, which is he prefixed to all volumes of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with the question of human guilt, passion and anguish. Esther Prine said the clergyman, I have striven with my young brother here, under whose preaching of the word you have been privileged to sit. Here Mr. Wilson let his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him. I have sought, I say, to persuade this golly youth that he should deal with you, here in faith of heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in earing of old people, as touching the violence and the blackness of your sin. Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could better judge what arguments to use, whether tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness and obstinacity, and so much that you should no longer hide the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes to me, with the young man's over-softness, albeit wise beyond his ears, that it were wronging the very nature of human to force or to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in showing of it forth, what say you to it, once again, Brother Deemsdale, must it be thou or I that shall deal with this poor sinner's soul? There was a murmur amongst the dignified and revered occupants of the balcony, and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its corporate, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered in respect towards youthful cruel argument whom he addressed. Good Master Deemsdale, said he, the responsibility of this woman's soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you, therefore, to exhort her to repentance and to confession, as the proof and consequence thereof. The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the old crowd up and reverend Mr. Deemsdale, the young clergyman who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of age into our wild forest land. His eloquence and religious fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in this profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with the light, lofty and impending brow, large brown, melancholic eyes, and the mouth which, enlays when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and the vast power of self-restraint. Notwithstanding his high-native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an error about this young minister, an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look, as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as duties would permit, he trod in shadowy by path, and thus kept himself simple and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel. Such was the young man whom driven Mr. Wilson, and the governor, had introduced you openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in the earing of all men, to that mystery of a woman's soul so sacred, even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous. Speak to the woman, my brother, said Mr. Wilson. It is a moment of her soul, and therefore, as the worshipful governor says, moment to thin own, in whose charge hers is, exhort her to confess the truth. The reverent Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came forward. After prime, said he, leaning over the balcony, and looking down steadfastly into her eyes. Thou hearest what this good man says, and cease the accountability under which I labor. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul's peace, and that I earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow sinner and fellow sufferer. Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him. For, believe me, Esther, though he would to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were its soul than to hide the guilty heart through life. What could thou silence do for him, except it tempt him, yea, compel him, as it were, to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven had granted thee an open ignominy, that, thereby, thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee and sorrow without. Take heed, how thou deniest to him, who, for chance, hath not courage to grasp it for himself, the bitter but wholesome cup that is now presented to thy lips. The young pastor's voice was tremulous sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that did so evidently manifest it, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby at Esther's bosom was affected by the same influence, for it erected its truth-awakened case towards Mr. Doomsdale, and held up its little arms with a half-please, half-plenty of murmur. So powerful seemed the minister's appeal, that people could not believe but that Esther Prine would speak out the guilty name, or else, that the guilty one himself, in whatever high or lowly place he should, would be drawn forth by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend scaffold. Esther shook her head, woman, transgressed not beyond the limits of heaven's mercy, cried rather than Mr. Wilson more harshly than before. That little baby hath been gifted with a voice to second and conform the council which thou hast heard. Speak out the name, that, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast. Never, replied Esther Prine, looking, not of Mr. Wilson, but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. It is too deeply branded, ye cannot take it off, and would add I might endure its agony as well as mine. Speak, woman, said another voice, cool and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about scaffold. Speak, and give a child a father. I will not speak, answered Esther, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. And my child must seek a heavenly father. She shall never know an earthly one. She will not speak. Mermet Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony with his hand upon his heart, had waited the result of his appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration. Round was strength and generosity of a woman's heart. She will not speak. Discerning the impractical state that the poor's culprit's mind, the elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion, addressed to the multitude of this curse of sin in all its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the people's heads, that it assumed new chairs in their imagination, and seemed to the rabbit scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal pit. Esther Prime, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of worrying difference. She had poured that morning all that nature could endure. And, as her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, up on her ears. The infant, during the later portion of her ordeal, burst the air with its wailing and screams. She strove to host it mechanically, but seemed scarlet to sympathize with its trouble. With the same heart-minor, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gates within its higher-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who appeared after her, that scarlet lair threw a lurid gleam along the dark passageway of the interior. Chapter 4 At Scarlet's Lair After return to the prison, as her primers found to be in a state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-friends at mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it, proving impossible to quell her insubordination by rebuke of threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer, thought few to introduce a physician. He described him as the man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and, likewise, familiar with whatever savage people could teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest. To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Esther herself, but still more urgently for the child, who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drunken it with all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which provided the mother a system. It now breathed in convulsions of pain, and was a forceful type, in its little frame of the moral agony which Esther Prime had borne throughout the day. Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that individual, a singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of such steep interest to the wearer of scarlet leather. He was lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any offense, but as most convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrate should have conferred with Indian Sajamore's respecting his ransom. His name was announced as Rosar Schillingworth. The jailer, after hushing him into the room, remained a moment, marveling at comparative quiet that followed his entrance, for Esther Prime had immediately become a stillest death of the child-continued moan. Pry thee, friend, leave me alone with my patient, said the practitioner. Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your house, and, I promise you, Mistress Prime Selyar, for be more amiable to just authority than you may have found her here to fore. Nay, if your horseship can accomplish that, answered Master Brackett, I shall only for a man of skill indeed. Fairly, German has been like a possessed one, and there lacks little that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes. The stranger that entered the room in the characteristic quietitude of the profession to which he announced himself as belonging, nor did this demeanor change when we troubled prison keeper left him face to face with woman, whose absurd notice of him in the crowd had intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His first care was given to the child, whose cries indeed, as she lay reading on the trundle bed, made it of preemptory necessity to postpone all other business to the task of suing her. He examined the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leatheren case, which he took from the niece's dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of water. My old stud is in alchemy, absurd he, and my sojourn, for above a year passed, among a pupil well versed in the kindly properties of symbols, had made a better physician of me than many that claimed medical degree. Here, woman, the child is yours, she is none of mine. Neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as of others. Administer this drug, therefore, with thine own hand. As to repel the offered medicine, at same time, gazing would strongly mark the pre-ension into his face. Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe? whispered she. Foolish woman. Responded physician, half coldly, half soothingly. What should hail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The medicine is potent for good, and worried my child, yea, my own, as well as thine, I could do no better for it. As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in so reasonable state of mind, he took the infant in his arms and himself administered the drug. It soon proved his efficacy, and with the intellect she splashed. The month of the little patient subsided, its convulsive tossing gradually seized, and in a few moments, as his custom of young children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intense scrutiny he felt her pulse, looked into her eyes, aghaze at her heart's rink and shudder, because of familiar and yet so strange and cold, and, finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another drug. I know not left nor in the painth, remarked he, but I have learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them. A receipt that an Indian taught me, in the title of some lessons of my own, that was all as paracelsus. Drink it. It may be less soothing than a seamless conscience, that I cannot give thee. But it will come to swell and heaving at thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea. He presented the cup to Esther, who received it with a slow, earnest look into his face. Not precisely a look of fear, yet, full of doubt and questioning as to what his purpose might be. She looked also at her slumber and child. I have thought of death, said she, have wished for it, would even have prayed for it, or it fit that such as I should pray for anything. Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, hear thy beholdest me quaff it. See, it is even now at my lips. Drink then, replied he, still with same cool composure. Thus thou know me so little, Esther Prime. Are my purposes want to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of engines, what could I do better for my objects and to let thy live, than to give thy medicines against all harm and peril of life, so that this burning shame may still blaze up on thy bosom? As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on scarlet ladder, which for with seemed scotch into Esther's breast, as if it had been red hot. He nostidered involuntarily, chester, and smiled. Live therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes of men and women, in the eyes of him, whom thou dist called thy husband, in the eyes of yonder child, and, that thou mayest live, take off this drug. Without further exfasulation or delay, Esther Prime drained the cup, and, at notion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed where the child was sleeping, while he drew the only chair which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not put tremble at these preparations, for she felt that, having now done all that humanity or principle or, if so it were, a refined cruelty, impaled him to do for the life of physical suffering, he was next to treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured. Esther said he, I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pits, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far too sick. It was my folly and thy weakness. I, a man of thought, the book-word of great labourers, a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge, what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own? Mis-happen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl's fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behalf, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest and entered the settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Esther Prine, standing up, a statue of ignominy before the people. Nay, from the moment when he came down the whole church steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld bell-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path. Down-nourished, said Esther, for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet step but stoken of her shame. Down-nourished that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any. True, replied he. It was my folly. I have said it. But up to that epoch of my life I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless. My heart was habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without the household fire. I longed to kindle one. It seemed not so wild a dream. All as I was, and sombre as I was, and mishappen as I was. That simple bliss, which is catered far and wide, for all mankind together up, might yet be mine. And so, Esther, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and thought to warm thee by the warmth which I present made there. I have greatly wronged thee, murmured Esther. We have wronged each other, answered he. Mine was first wrong, when I betrayed thy pothin' youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophied in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Esther, the man lives who has wronged us both. Who is he? Ask me not, replied Esther Prime, looking firmly into his face. That I shall never know. Never, sayest thou. Rejoined he, with a smalt of dark and self-relying intelligence. Never know him. Believe me, Esther, there are few things whether in the outward world, or to a certain depth, in the individual's favorite thought, few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the Prime Altitude. Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have thought through sin books, as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unwares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine. The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glow to intensely open her that, as to the Prime, clasper hand over her heart, dreading less, he should read secret there at once. Thou will not reveal his name. Not less, he is mine. Resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. He bears no layer of infamy rocked into his garment, as thou dost, but I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him. Think not that I shall interfere with heaven's own method of retribution, or, to my own laws, betray him to the grip of human love. Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive heart against his life. No, nor against his fame. If, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live. Let him hide himself in outward honour, if he may. Not less, he shall be mine. Thy acts are like mercy, said Esther bewilder and depile, but thy words interpret thee as a terror. One thing. Thou that was my life, I would enjoin up on thee. Continued scholar. Thou hast kept secret of thy paramour. Keep likewise mine. There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband. Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent. For, elsewhere a wanderer and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child. Amongst women myself there exists the closest lingaments. No matter where of love or hate, no matter whether of right or wrong. Thou and thine, Esther prime, belong to me. My home is where thou art and where he is, but betray me not. Wherefore dost thou desire it? Inquired Esther, shrinking, she hardly knew why, from the secret bound. Why not announce thyself openly and cast me off at once? It may be, he replied, because I will not encounter the dishonour that besmirches the husband of a faceless woman. It may be for other reasons. Enough. It is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband be to the worldest one already dead, and of whom no tithing shall ever come. Recognize me not by word, by sign, by look. Breathe not secret above all to demand thou hottest of. Should thou fail me in this, beware. His fame, his position, his life will be in my hands. Beware. I'll keep thy secret, and I have his. Said Esther, swear it. Rejoin he. And she took to oath. And now, Mistress Prine, said old Roger Schillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named. I leave thee alone, alone with thy infant and scarlet lair. Who is it, Esther? Doth thou sentence my indeed to wear the token in thy sleep, arton out the fright of nightmares and hideous dreams? Why dost thou smile so at me? Inquired Esther troubled at the expression of his eyes. Artow liked the black man that hunts the forest round about us. Esther enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul. Not thy soul, he answered with another smile. No, not thine. And of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of the Scarlet Letter This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 5. Esther at Her Needle Esther Prince's Charm of Confinement was now at an end. The prison door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed to her sick and morbid heart, as it meant for no other purpose that to reveal the Scarlet Letter on her breast. Professor was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison than even in the procession and spectacle that had been described, where she was made the common infamy at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph, it was moreover a separate and insulated event to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength that she would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that condemned her, a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support, as well as to annihilate in his iron arm, had held her up through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with the unattended walk from her prison door, he came to daily custom, and she must either sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it, so would the next day, so would the next, each its own trial. And yet, the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be born, the days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up and bear along with her, but never to fling down, for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. Route them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and the moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of a woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, at her, the child of the honorable parents, at her, the mother of the babe that would hereafter be a woman, at her, who had once been innocent as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy at which she must carry thither would be her only monument. And may seem marvelous that, with the world before her, kept by no restrictive clause or her condemnation within the limits of the purits and settlement, so remote and so obscure, free to return to her birthplace or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being, and having also the passes of the dark inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with the people's customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her. It may seem marvelous that this woman should still call that place her home, where and where only, she must need to be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt the ghost-like. The spot where some great and marked event has given the color to her lifetime, and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest land still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, and to hest her prince wild and dreary but lifelong home. All other scenes of earth, even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be her and her mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago, were foreign to her in comparison. The chain that found her here was made of iron links and galling in her inmost soul, but could never be broken. It might be too, doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole. It might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trod the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union that unrecognized on earth will bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage altar for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again the tempster of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy at which she seized and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face and hastened to borrow it from its dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe, what finally she reasoned upon as her motive to continuing a resident of New England was half a truth and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment. And so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length urge her soul and work out another purity than that which she had lost, more saint-like because the results of martyrdom. Pester print, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small, thatched cottage. It had been built by an earlier settler and abandoned because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation. While its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of social activity which already marked the habits of the immigrants, it stood on the shore, looking across the basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills toward the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as alone, grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seemed to denote that there was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed and by the license of the magistrates who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Pester established herself with her infant child. A mystic's shadow on the suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot. Children too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities would creep nigh enough to behold her flying her needle out at the cottage window, or standing in the doorway, or laboring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and discerning that scarlet letter on her breast would scamper off with a strange contagious fear. Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred even no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed even on a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then is now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp of needlework. She bore on her breast in the curiously embroidered letter a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here indeed in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with. Public ceremonies such as the Ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all that could give magistory to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people, were as a matter of policy marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial ensemble, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs painfully broad fans and gorgeously embroidered gloves were all deemed necessary to the official state of men, assuming the reins of power, and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals too, whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors, there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Kring could supply. Baby linen, for babies, then wore robes of state, afforded still another possibility of toil and emoliment. By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commissuration for a woman of so miserable a destiny, or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things, or by whatever other intangible circumstances was then, as now sufficient to bestow on some persons what others might seek in vain, or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant, it is certain that she had ready and fairly required employment for many hours as she sought fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity it may be chose to mortify itself by putting on for ceremonials of pomp and state the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle work was seen on the ruff of the governor, military men wore it on their scars, and the minister on his band. It decked the baby's little cat, who was shut up to be mild-wended and moldered away in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever relentless vigor with which society frowned upon her sin. Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a substance, but the plainest and most ascetic description for herself and a simple abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the course's materials and the most somber hue, with only that of one ornament, the scarlet letter, which it was her doom to wear. The child's attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the eerie charm that earlier began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to also have a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for the small expenditure and decoration on her infant, Hester be bestowed on her some hurtfulest means and charity on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time which she might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in the mode of an occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She added in her nature a rich, voluptuous, oriental characteristic, a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which save in the exquisite productions of her needle found nothing else in all the possibilities of her life to exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure incomprehensible for the other sex from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne, it might have been a mode of expressing and therefore soothing the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as a sin. This morbid meddling of conscious with an immaterial matter be token. It is to be feared, no genuine, and steadfast penance, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath. In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world. With her native energy of character and rare capacity, it could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her more intolerable to a woman's heart than that which branded the brow of Cain. And all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished. And as much as alone as if she inhabited another sphere, but communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of humankind. She stood apart from moral interests, yet close beside them, long a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside and can no longer make itself seen or felt, no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow, or should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seem to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy, and her position, although she understood it well and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already said, who she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, it reviled the hand that was stretched forth to secure them. Dames had elevated rank likewise whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart, sometimes through the alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary tribals, and sometimes also by a coarser expression that fell upon the sufferer's defenseless breast with a rough blow upon an ulcerated womb. Kester had schooled herself long and well, she never responded to these attacks, saved by a flush of crimson that rose irreplaceably over the pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient, a martyr, indeed, but she forbear to pray for her enemies, blessed, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse. Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable frauds of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation that brought a crowd with its mingled grin and frown around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the universal father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children, for they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town with never any companion but only one child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries and the utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was nonetheless terrible to her as preceding from the lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame that all nature knew of it. It could have caused her no deeper pain had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves, had the summer breeze murmured about it, had the wintery blast shrieked it aloud. Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of the new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter and none ever failed to do so, they branded it afresh into Hester's soul so that oftentimes she could scarcely refrain, it always did refrain from covering the symbol with her hand. But then again an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare, the familiarity was intolerable. From first to last in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling the human eye upon the token, the spot never grew callous it seemed on the contrary to grow more sensitive with the daily torture. But sometimes once in many days or perchance in many months she felt an eye, a human eye, upon the ignominious brand that seemed to give a momentary relief as if half her agony were shared. The next instant back at all rushed again with still a deeper throb of pain for in that brief interval she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned alone? Her imagination somehow affected and had she been a softer, moral and intellectual fiber would have been still more so by the strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro with those lonely footsteps in the little world with which she had outwardly connected and now and then appeared to Hester if altogether fancy it was never let the less too impotent to be resisted. She felt or fancied then that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe yet could not help believing that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in our hearts. She was terror stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel who would fain have pursued the struggling woman as yet only half his victim? That the outward guise of purity was but a lie and that if truth were everywhere to be shown a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a blizzard besides Hester Prince. Or must she receive those intimidations so obscure yet so distant as truth? In all her miserable experience there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as the sense. Perplex as well as shocked her by the irreverent opportunities and the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic thrive. She passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice to whom the age of antique reverence looked up as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. What evil thing is at hand? Would Hester say to herself, lifting her reluctant eyes, there'd be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of the earthly saint? Again the mystic sisterhood would contume as she astray assert itself as she met the sanctified crown of some matron who, according to the rumor of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsun snow in the matron's bosom and the burning shema in Hester Prince would have the two in common. For once more the electric thrill would give her warning. Behold, Hester here is a companion. And looking up she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted with a faint chill cruising in her cheeks as if her purity were somewhat solely by the momentary glance. O fiend whose talisman was of that fatal symbol, what's thou weeping nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere? Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty and man's hard law that Hester Prince yet struggled to believe that no fellow mortal was guilty like herself. The vulgar, who in their dreary old times were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They avert that the symbol was not a mere scarlet cloth tinged in an earthly dye pot, but was the red hot with infernal fire and could be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prince walked abroad in the night time. And we must need say it seared Hester's bosom so deeply that perhaps there was more truth in that rumor than our modern incredulity would be inclined to admit. End of Chapter 5 of the Scarlet Letter Chapter 6 Pearl We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant, that little creature whose innocent life had sprung by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the growth and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child. Her pearl, for so had Hester called her not as a name expressive of her aspect which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned luster that would be indicated by the comparison. But she named the infant Pearl as being of great price, purchased with all she had, her mother's only treasure. How strange indeed, man had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child whose place was on that same dishonored bosom to connect her parent forever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven. Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil. She could have no faith therefore that its result would be good. Day after day she looked fearfully into the child's expanding nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being. Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden, worthy to have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the world's first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty. Its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose, that may be better understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore before the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her, on the dark-sum cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety. In this one child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the wildflower prettiness of a peasant baby and the pomp in little of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue which she never lost, and if in any of her changes she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to be herself, it would have been no longer Pearl. This outward mutability indicated and did not more than fairly express the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety, but, or else Hester's fears deceived her, it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had been broken, and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered. Hester could only account for the child's character, and even then most vaguely and imperfectly, by recalling what she herself had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world and her bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted into the unborn infant the rays of its moral life, and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery luster, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child's disposition, but later in the day of earthly existence might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind. The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind than now. The frown, the harsher buke, the frequent application of the rod enjoined by scriptural authority were used not merely in the way of punishment for actual offenses, but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity, mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes. She early sought to impose a tender but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge, but the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted, as to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach in accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look that warned her when it would be labor thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so malicious but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility. It was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes we know not wither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child, to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began, to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses, not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood and not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before. Hearts smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell that so often came between herself and her sole treasure whom she had bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps, for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her, Pearl would frown and clench her little fist and harden her small features into a stern, unsympathizing look of discontent. Not seldom she would laugh anew and louder than before like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or, but this more rarely happened, she would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in conviting herself to that gusty tenderness. It passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness, until, perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids, little Pearl awoke. How soon and with what strange rapidity indeed did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense words. And then what a happiness would it have been could Hester Prynne have heard her clear bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unraveled her own darling's tones amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children. But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world, an imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness. The destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her, the whole peculiarity in short of her position in respect to other children. Never since her release from prison had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her walks about the town Pearl, too, was there, first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, desporting themselves in such grim fashions as the puritanic nurture would permit, playing at going to church, per chance, or at scourging Quakers, or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them with shrill, incoherent exclamations that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue. The truth was that the little puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions in the mother and the child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not infrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value and even comfort for the mother, because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here again a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester's heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society, and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Pren before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening influences of maternity. At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever-creative spirit and communicated itself to a thousand objects as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials, a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower, where the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk with all. The pine trees, aged, black and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders. The ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect with no continuity, indeed but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity, soon sinking down as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties, except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad, then what depth of sorrow to a mother who felt in her own heart the cause, to observe in one so young this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause in the contest that must ensue. Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees and cried out with an agony which she would feign have hidden, but which made utterance for itself between speech and a groan. O Father in heaven, if thou art still my Father, what is this being which I have brought into the world? And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through some more subtle channel of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play. One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be told. The very first thing which she had noticed in her life was, what, not the mother's smile responding to it as other babies do, by that faint embryo smile of the little mouth remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile, by no means, but that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was, shall we say it, the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom. One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter, and putting up her little hand she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring to tear it away so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby hand. Again, as if her mother's agonized gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes and smile, from that epic except when the child was asleep. Hester had never felt a moment's safety, not a moment's calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl's gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter, but then again it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death and always with that peculiar smile and odd expression of the eyes. Once this freakish, elfish cast came into the child's eyes while Hester was looking at her own image in them as mothers are fond of doing, and suddenly, for women in solitude and with troubled hearts are pestered with unaccountable delusions, she fancied that she beheld not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion. In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wildflowers and flinging them one by one at her mother's bosom, dancing up and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands, but whether from pride or resignation or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester with that little laughing image of a fiend peeping out, or whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes. Child, what art thou? cried the mother. Oh, I am your little Pearl, answered the child. But while she said it, Pearl laughed and began to dance up and down with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney. Art thou, my child, in very truth, ask Hester? Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but for the moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness, for such was Pearl's wonderful intelligence that her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself. Yes, I am little Pearl, repeated the child, continuing her antics. Thou art not my child, thou art no Pearl of mine, said the mother half playfully, for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither? Tell me, mother, said the child seriously, coming up to Hester and pressing herself close to her knees. Do thou tell me? Thy Heavenly Father sent thee, answered Hester Prynne. But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of the child, whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness or because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and touched the scarlet letter. He did not send me, cried she positively, I have no Heavenly Father. Hush, Pearl, hush, thou must not talk so, answered the mother, suppressing a groan. He sent us all into the world. He sent even me, thy mother. Then much more thee, or if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come? Tell me, tell me, repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing and capering about the floor, it is thou that must tell me. But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal labyrinth of doubt. She remembered, betwixt a smile and a shudder, the talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child's paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring, such as ever since old Catholic times had occasionally been seen on earth through the agency of their mother's sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed. More was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England Puritans. CHAPTER VII. THE GOVERNOR'S HALL. Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with a pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order, and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state. For, though the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an honourable and influential place among the colonial magistracy. Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of embroidered gloves impelled Hester at this time to seek an interview with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the settlement. It had reached her ears that there was a design on the part of some of the leading inhabitants cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and government to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a stumbling block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral and religious growth and possess the elements of ultimate salvation, then surely it would enjoy all the fairer prospects of these advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's. Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular and indeed not a little ludicrous that an affair of this kind, which in later days would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the select men of the town, should then have been a question publicly discussed and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At that epic of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature. Full of concern, therefore, but so conscious of her own right that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on one side and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature on the other, Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side and constantly in motion, from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms, but was soon as imperious to be let down again and whisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant beauty, a beauty that's shown with deep and vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep glossy brown, and which in after years would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout her. She seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play, arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut abundantly embroidered in fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of coloring which must have given a wane and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth. But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb and indeed of the child's whole appearance that irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form, the scarlet letter endowed with life. The mother herself, as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its form, had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But in truth Pearl was the one as well as the other, and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance. As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from their play, or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins, and spoke gravely one to another. Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter, and of a truth moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side. Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them. But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled in her fierce pursuit of them an infant pestilence. The scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment, whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which doubtless caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The victory accomplished Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up, smiling, into her face. Without further adventure they reached the dwelling of Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns, now moss-grown, crumbling to decay and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences remembered or forgotten that have happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness gleaming forth from the sunny windows of a human habitation into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed, so that when the sunshine fell a slant-wise over the front of the edifice it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double-handful. The brilliancy might have fitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of a grave-old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable for the admiration of aftertimes. Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and dance and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine should be stripped off its front and given her to play with. No, my little Pearl, said her mother, thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee. They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which were lattice windows, the wooden shutters to close over them at need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons which was answered by one of the governor's bond-servants, a freeborn Englishman, but now a seven-year slave. During that term he was to be the property of his master and as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox or a joint stool. The serf wore the customary garb of serving men at that period and long before in the old hereditary halls of England. Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within, inquired Hester? Yea, for Soothe replied the bond-servant, staring with wide open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a newcomer in the country, he had never before seen. Yea, his honourable worship is within, but he hath a godly minister or two with him and likewise a leech. Yea may not see his worship now. Nevertheless I will enter, answered Hester Prynne, and the bond-servant perhaps judging from the decision of her heir and the glittering symbol in her bosom that she was a great lady in the land offered no opposition. So the mother and little pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance. With many variations, suggested by the nature of his building materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after the residences of gentlemen of Ferris State in his native land. Here then was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole depth of the house and forming a medium of general communication more or less directly with all the other apartments. At one extremity this spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which formed a small recess on either side of the portal. At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embalmed hall windows which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushioned seat. Here on the cushion lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature, even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the center table to be turned over by the casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers, and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms transferred hither from the Governor's paternal home. On the table, in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind, stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draft of ale. On the wall hung a row of portraits representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armor on their breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on, as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men. At about the center of the oaken panels that lined the hall was suspended a suit of mail, not like the pictures an ancestral relic, but of the most modern date, for it had been manufactured by a skilful armorer in London the same year in which Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a steel headpiece, a cuirass, a gorge and greaves, and a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath. All, and especially the helmet and breastplate so highly burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter and illumination everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the Pequod War. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of bacon, coke, noy, and finch as his professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler. Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armor as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate. Mother, cried she, I see you here, look, look! Hester looked by way of humoring the child, and she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upwards also at a similar picture in the headpiece, smiling at her mother with the alphish intelligence that was so familiar and expression to her small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect that it made Hester print feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who was seeking to mold itself into Pearl's shape. Come along, Pearl, said she, drawing her away. Come and look into this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there, more beautiful ones than we find in the woods. Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window at the further end of the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden-walk carpeted with closely shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished as hopeless the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbage's grew in plain sight, and a pumpkin vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening space and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall-window as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England Earth would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula, that half mythological personage who rides through our early annals seated on the back of a bowl. Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for our red rose, and would not be pacified. Hush, child, hush, said her mother earnestly, do not cry, dear little Pearl, I hear voices in the garden, the Governor is coming, and gentlemen along with him. In fact, a down the vista of the Garden Avenue, a number of persons were seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent, not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of those new personages.