The Scarlet Letter Read online

  I.

  THE PRISON-DOOR.

  A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray,steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods andothers bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, thedoor of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with ironspikes.

  The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue andhappiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized itamong their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of thevirgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of aprison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed thatthe forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewherein the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked outthe first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about hisgrave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregatedsepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is,that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town,the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and otherindications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to itsbeetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work ofits oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the NewWorld. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have knowna youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and thewheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown withburdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, whichevidently found something congenial in the soil that had so earlyborne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one sideof the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wildrose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty tothe prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he cameforth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pityand be kind to him.

  This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, solong after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originallyovershadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority forbelieving, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted AnnHutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon usto determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of ournarrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal,we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, andpresent it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize somesweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve thedarkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.