The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Custom-House: INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER."

It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk
overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my
personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my
life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The
first time was three or four years since, when I favored the
reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the
indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a
description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old
Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to
find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the
public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a
Custom-House. The example of the famous "P. P., Clerk of this
Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to
be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind,
the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his
volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him,
better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors,
indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such
confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be
addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of
perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the
wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the
writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by
bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous,
however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But--as
thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker
stand in some true relation with his audience--it may be
pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive,
though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and
then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness,
we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of
ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this
extent and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be
autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or
his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a
certain propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as
explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into
my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a
narrative therein contained. This, in fact,--a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the
most prolix among the tales that make up my volume,--this, and no
other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with
the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has appeared
allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint representation
of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of
the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to
make one.

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century
ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,--but
which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and
exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps,
a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging
hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out
her cargo of firewood,--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated
wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the
base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many
languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass,--here, with
a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or
droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally,
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of
Uncle Sam's government, is here established. Its front is
ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite
steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an
enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a
shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of
intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With
the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy
fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the
general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the
inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens,
careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which
she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she
looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter
themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I
presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an
eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her
best of moods, and, sooner or later,--oftener soon than late,--is
apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab
of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we
may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has
grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of
late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In
some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon
when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions
might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last
war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned,
as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit
her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell,
needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New
York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels
happen to have arrived at once,--usually from Africa or South
America,--or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,
there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down
the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you
may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his
vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too,
comes his owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks,
accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been
realized in merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or
has buried him under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will
care to rid him of. Here, likewise,--the germ of the
wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant,--we have the
smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub
does of blood, and already sends adventures in his master's
ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound
sailor, in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one,
pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we
forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring
firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but
contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying
trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were,
with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for
the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More
frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would
discern--in the entry, if it were summer time, or in their
appropriate rooms, if wintry or inclement weather--a row of
venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were
tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they
were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy
that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other
human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on
monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent
exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew, at the
receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence,
like him, for apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers.

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a
certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty
height; with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the
aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a
narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give
glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and
ship-chandlers; around the doors of which are generally to be
seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such
other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room
itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is
strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen
into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general
slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which
womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very
infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with
a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool
beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly
decrepit and infirm; and,--not to forget the library,--on some
shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a
bulky Digest of the Revenue Laws. A tin pipe ascends through the
ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with other
parts of the edifice. And here, some six months ago,--pacing from
corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his
elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns
of the morning newspaper,--you might have recognized, honored
reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery
little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through
the willow branches, on the western side of the Old Manse. But
now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain
for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out
of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets
his emoluments.

This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much
away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or
did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have
never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.
Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its
flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few
or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,--its
irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only
tame,--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the
whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea
at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other,--such
being the features of my native town, it would be quite as
reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checkerboard. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,
there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a
better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment
is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family
has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a
quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my
name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered
settlement, which has since become a city. And here his
descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their
earthly substance with the soil; until no small portion of it
must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a
little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the
attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust
for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as
frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need
they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of
that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and
dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back
as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference
to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim
to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor,--who came so
early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street
with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of
war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is
seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter
persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in
their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to
be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these
were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that
their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So
deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter
Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not
crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of
mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for
their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy
consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events,
I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame
upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by
them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous
condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to
exist--may be now and henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed
Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for
his sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of
the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have
borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I
have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success
of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been
brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than worthless,
if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray
shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books!
What kind of a business in life,--what mode of glorifying God, or
being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,--may that
be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a
fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied between my
great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet,
let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature
have intertwined themselves with mine.

Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by
these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since
subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as
I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom
or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a
claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of
sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get
covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil.
From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from
the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took
the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray
and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.
The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the
cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with
the natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot,
as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the
human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in
the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not
love, but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came himself from a
foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little
claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the
oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his
third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that
the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment,
the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;--all
these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are
nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as
powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has
it been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem
my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character
which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one
representative of the race lay down in his grave, another
assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the Main
Street--might still in my little day be seen and recognized in
the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence
that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at
last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a
potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of
generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had
other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my
control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me
to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as
well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It
was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away,--as
it seemed, permanently,--but yet returned, like the bad
half-penny; or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of
the universe. So, one fine morning, I ascended the flight of
granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and
was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my
weighty responsibility, as chief executive officer of the
Custom-House.

I doubt greatly--or rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any
public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or
military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans
under his orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest
Inhabitant was at once settled, when I looked at them. For
upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent
position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of
the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure of
office generally so fragile. A soldier,--New England's most
distinguished soldier,--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his
gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of
the successive administrations through which he had held office,
he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of
danger and heart-quake. General Miller was radically
conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight
influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with
difficulty moved to change, even when change might have brought
unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my
department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every
sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous blast,
had finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, with little to
disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presidential
election, they one and all acquired a new lease of existence.
Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men to age and
infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept
death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured,
being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed
of making their appearance at the Custom-House, during a large
part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out
into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they
termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake
themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of
abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these
venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my
representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon
afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for
their country's service; as I verily believe it was--withdrew to
a better world. It is a pious consolation to me, that, through my
interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance
of the evil and corrupt practices, into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall.
Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens
on the road to Paradise.

The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their
venerable brotherhood, that the new Surveyor was not a
politician, and, though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither
received nor held his office with any reference to political
services. Had it been otherwise,--had an active politician been
put into this influential post, to assume the easy task of making
head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld him
from the personal administration of his office,--hardly a man of
the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life,
within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the
Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such
matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a
politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the axe
of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern, that the old
fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and
at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended
my advent; to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a
century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance of so harmless an
individual as myself; to detect, as one or another addressed me,
the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days, had been wont to
bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten
Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old
persons, that, by all established rule,--and, as regarded some of
them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for business,--they
ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in
politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our
common Uncle. I knew it too, but could never quite find in my
heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and deservedly to my own
discredit, therefore, and considerably to the detriment of my
official conscience, they continued, during my incumbency, to
creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House
steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their
accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the
wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one
another with the several thousandth repetition of old
sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be pass-words
and countersigns among them.

The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had
no great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy
consciousness of being usefully employed,--in their own behalf,
at least, if not for our beloved country,--these good old
gentlemen went through the various formalities of office.
Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds
of vessels! Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and
marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones
to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance
occurred,--when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been
smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their
unsuspicious noses,--nothing could exceed the vigilance and
alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and
secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the
delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their previous
negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on
their praiseworthy caution, after the mischief had happened; a
grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal, the moment
that there was no longer any remedy!

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my
foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of
my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that which
usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby
I recognize the man. As most of these old Custom-House officers
had good traits, and as my position in reference to them, being
paternal and protective, was favorable to the growth of friendly
sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It was pleasant, in the
summer forenoons,--when the fervent heat, that almost liquefied
the rest of the human family, merely communicated a genial warmth
to their half-torpid systems,--it was pleasant to hear them
chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the
wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations
were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their lips.
Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the
mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of
humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a
gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery
aspect alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In
one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more
resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.

It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to
represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the
first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were
men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and
energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent
mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them. Then,
moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the
thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. But, as
respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be no
wrong done, if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation
from their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung
away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had
enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully
to have stored their memories with the husks. They spoke with far
more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or
yesterday's, to-day's, or to-morrow's dinner, than of the
shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's
wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.

The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the
respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States--was
a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a
legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or
rather, born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary
colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an
office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the
early ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector,
when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or
thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of
winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime's
search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure, smartly
arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous
step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether, he seemed--not
young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in
the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to
touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through
the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle
of an old man's utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs,
like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at
him merely as an animal,--and there was very little else to look
at,--he was a most satisfactory object, from the thorough
healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity,
at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights
which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The careless
security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular income,
and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had
no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The
original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare
perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of
intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual
ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely
enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on
all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling,
no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few
common-place instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that
grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very
respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He
had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the
father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of
childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to dust. Here, one
would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the
sunniest disposition, through and through, with a sable tinge.
Not so with our old Inspector! One brief sigh sufficed to carry
off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next
moment, he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant; far
readier than the Collector's junior clerk, who, at nineteen years
was much the elder and graver man of the two.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I
think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there
presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so
perfect in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so
impalpable, such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My
conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing,
as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so
cunningly had the few materials of his character been put
together, that there was no painful perception of deficiency,
but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him.
It might be difficult--and it was so--to conceive how he should
exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely
his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his
last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral
responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger
scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed
immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of age.

One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his
four-footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good
dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of
his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait;
and to hear him talk of roast-meat was as appetizing as a pickle
or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither
sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all
his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit
of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him
expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most
eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His
reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the
actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under
one's very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate, that had
lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were
still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had
just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips
over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been
food for worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts of
bygone meals were continually rising up before him; not in anger
or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation,
and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at
once shadowy and sensual. A tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of
veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably
praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board in the
days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all the
subsequent experience of our race, and all the events that
brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him
with as little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief
tragic event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, was
his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some twenty
or forty years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which,
at table, proved so inveterately tough that the carving-knife
would make no impression on its carcass; and it could only be
divided with an axe and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should
be glad to dwell at considerably more length, because, of all men
whom I have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a
Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing to causes which I may
not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this
peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it,
and, were he to continue in office to the end of time, would be
just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as
good an appetite.

There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete; but which my
comparatively few opportunities for observation enable me to
sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the Collector,
our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military
service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western
territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the
decline of his varied and honorable life. The brave soldier had
already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore years and ten,
and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened
with infirmities which even the martial music of his own
spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards lightening.
The step was palsied now, that had been foremost in the charge.
It was only with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his
hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome
progress across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the
fireplace. There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim
serenity of aspect at the figures that came and went; amid the
rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of
business, and the casual talk of the office; all which sounds and
circumstances seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and
hardly to make their way into his inner sphere of contemplation.
His countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly. If his
notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed
out upon his features; proving that there was light within him,
and that it was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp
that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer you
penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.
When no longer called upon to speak, or listen, either of which
operations cost him an evident effort, his face would briefly
subside into its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not
painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the
imbecility of decaying age. The framework of his nature,
originally strong and massive, was not yet crumbled into ruin.

To observe and define his character, however, under such
disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build
up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from
a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance,
the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a
shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown,
through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien
weeds.

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,--for,
slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards
him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might
not improperly be termed so,--I could discern the main points of
his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities
which showed it to be not a mere accident, but of good right,
that he had won a distinguished name. His spirit could never, I
conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it must,
at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in
motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an
adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out
or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and
which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and
flickers in a blaze, but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of iron in
a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression of
his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at
the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then,
that, under some excitement which should go deeply into his
consciousness,--roused by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken
all of his energies that were not dead, but only slumbering,--he
was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a sick man's
gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and
starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment, his
demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition,
however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated,
nor desired. What I saw in him--as evidently as the
indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga, already cited as the
most appropriate simile--were the features of stubborn and
ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy
in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other
endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as
unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of
benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at
Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp
as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the
age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I
know;--certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the
sweep of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit
imparted its triumphant energy;--but, be that as it might, there
was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the
down off a butterfly's wing. I have not known the man, to whose
innate kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal.

Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the
least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch--must have
vanished, or been obscured, before I met the General. All merely
graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does
Nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that
have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and
crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined
fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and
beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humor, now
and then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction,
and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native
elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood
or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness for the sight
and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to
prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one, who
seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe.

There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit;
while the Surveyor--though seldom, when it could be avoided,
taking upon himself the difficult task of engaging him in
conversation--was fond of standing at a distance, and watching
his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He seemed away from
us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we
passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have
stretched forth our hands and touched his own. It might be, that
he lived a more real life within his thoughts, than amid the
unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The
evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish
of old, heroic music, heard thirty years before;--such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense.
Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks, and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of this
commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round
about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the
General appear to sustain the most distant relation. He was as
much out of place as an old sword--now rusty, but which had
flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright
gleam along its blade--would have been, among the inkstands,
paper-folders, and mahogany rulers, on the Deputy Collector's
desk.

There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and
re-creating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier,--the
man of true and simple energy. It was the recollection of those
memorable words of his,--"I'll try, Sir!"--spoken on the very
verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the
soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all
perils, and encountering all. If, in our country, valor were
rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase--which it seems so easy
to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory
before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest of all
mottoes for the General's shield of arms.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual
health, to be brought into habits of companionship with
individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and
whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to
appreciate. The accidents of my life have often afforded me this
advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than during my
continuance in office. There was one man, especially, the
observation of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His
gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all
perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish,
as by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in
the Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the
many intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper,
presented themselves before him with the regularity of a
perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as
the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the main-spring that kept its
variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like
this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own
profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to
their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must perforce
seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by an
inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did
our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which
everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and kind
forbearance towards our stupidity,--which, to his order of mind,
must have seemed little short of crime,--would he forthwith, by
the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as
clear as daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his
esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect; it was a law of
nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it
be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so
remarkably clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in
the administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to
any thing that came within the range of his vocation, would
trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to a far
greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an
ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a
word,--and it is a rare instance in my life,--I had met with a
person thoroughly adapted to the situation which he held.

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself
connected. I took it in good part at the hands of Providence,
that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past
habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever
profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and
impracticable schemes, with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm;
after living for three years within the subtile influence of an
intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau
about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden;
after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement
of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment
at Longfellow's hearth-stone;--it was time, at length, that I
should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself
with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the
old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who
had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some
measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no
essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of
altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment
in my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were
apart from me. Nature,--except it were human nature,--the nature
that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden
from me; and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been
spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if
it had not been departed, was suspended and inanimate within me.
There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all
this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to
recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true,
indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be
lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I
had been, without transforming me into any shape which it would
be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other
than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a
low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a
new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change
would come.

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as
I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A
man of thought, fancy, and sensibility, (had he ten times the
Surveyor's proportion of those qualities,) may, at any time, be a
man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the
trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains
with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of
connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in
no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page
of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they
had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the
least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen
like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House
officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson--though it
may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary
fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's
dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle
in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly
devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he
achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed
the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but, at any
rate, I learned it thoroughly; nor, it gives me pleasure to
reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever
cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way
of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer--an excellent
fellow, who came into office with me, and went out only a little
later--would often engage me in a discussion about one or the
other of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The
Collector's junior clerk, too,--a young gentleman who, it was
whispered, occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam's
letter-paper with what (at the distance of a few yards,) looked
very much like poetry,--used now and then to speak to me of
books, as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This
was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient
for my necessities.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned
abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another
kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a
stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto,
and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise,
in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and gone
regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of
fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it,
was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope, will
never go again.

But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts,
that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest
so quietly, revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions,
when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings
it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the
sketch which I am now writing.

In the second story of the Custom-House, there is a large room,
in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered
with panelling and plaster. The edifice--originally projected on
a scale adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and
with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined never to be
realized--contains far more space than its occupants know what to
do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector's
apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the
aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears still to await
the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in
a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon another,
containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of
similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to
think how many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil,
had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an
encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten
corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But, then,
what reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the dulness of
official formalities, but with the thought of inventive brains
and the rich effusion of deep hearts--had gone equally to
oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their
day, as these heaped-up papers had, and--saddest of all--without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the
clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless
scratchings of the pen! Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as
materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the
former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of
her princely merchants,--old King Derby,--old Billy Gray,--old
Simon Forrester,--and many another magnate in his day; whose
powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his
mountain-pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the
greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of
Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings
of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the
Revolution, upward to what their children look upon as
long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution, there is a dearth of records; the
earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having,
probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the King's
officials accompanied the British army in its flight from Boston.
It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going back,
perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have
contained many references to forgotten or remembered men, and to
antique customs, which would have affected me with the same
pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the
field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a
discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the
heaped-up rubbish in the corner; unfolding one and another
document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago
foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of
merchants, never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily
decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters
with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow
on the corpse of dead activity,--and exerting my fancy, sluggish
with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the
old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only
Salem knew the way thither,--I chanced to lay my hand on a small
package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow
parchment. This envelope had the air of an official record of
some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and
formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present.
There was something about it that quickened an instinctive
curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape, that tied up the
package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to
light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found
it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor
Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his
Majesty's Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's
Annals) a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about
fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent
times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little
grave-yard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my
respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some
fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle; which,
unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory
preservation. But, on examining the papers which the parchment
commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's
mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the
frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private
nature, or, at least, written in his private capacity, and
apparently with his own hand. I could account for their being
included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by the fact,
that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly; and that these
papers, which he probably kept in his official desk, had never
come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to relate to
the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives to
Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern, was
left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor--being little molested, I suppose, at that
early day, with business pertaining to his office--seems to have
devoted some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local
antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a similar nature. These
supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would
otherwise have been eaten up with rust.

A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in
the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to
purposes equally valuable, hereafter, or not impossibly may be
worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem,
should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious
a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman,
inclined, and competent, to take the unprofitable labor off my
hands. As a final disposition, I contemplate depositing them with
the Essex Historical Society.

But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious
package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and
faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which,
however, was greatly frayed and defaced; so that none, or very
little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy
to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch
(as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives
evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by the
process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth,--for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced
it to little other than a rag,--on careful examination, assumed
the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an
accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three
inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could
be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to
be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were
signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the
fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of
solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned
aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy
of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the
mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities,
but evading the analysis of my mind.

While thus perplexed,--and cogitating, among other hypotheses,
whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations
which the white men used to contrive in order to take the eyes of
Indians,--I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to
me,--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word,--it seemed
to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether
physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter
were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and
involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had
hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around
which it had been twisted. This I now opened, and had the
satisfaction to find, recorded by the old Surveyor's pen, a
reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair. There were
several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting
the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to
have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our
ancestors. She had flourished during a period between the early
days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century.
Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from
whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered
her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a
stately and solemn aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost
immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of voluntary
nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking
upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially
those of the heart; by which means, as a person of such
propensities inevitably must, she gained from many people the
reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked upon
by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying farther into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of
this singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to
the story entitled "THE SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne
carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are
authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue.
The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself,--a
most curious relic,--are still in my possession, and shall be
freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of
the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be
understood as affirming, that, in the dressing up of the tale,
and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced
the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined
myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half a dozen
sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to
such points, nearly or altogether as much license as if the facts
had been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the
authenticity of the outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track.
There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me
as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone
by, and wearing his immortal wig,--which was buried with him, but
did not perish in the grave,--had met me in the deserted chamber
of the Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who had
borne his Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated
by a ray of the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about the
throne. How unlike, alas! the hang-dog look of a republican
official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less
than the least, and below the lowest, of his masters. With his
own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had
imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of
explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had
exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and
reverence towards him,--who might reasonably regard himself as my
official ancestor,--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten
lucubrations before the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr.
Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so
imposing within its memorable wig, "do this, and the profit shall
be all your own! You will shortly need it; for it is not in your
days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and
oftentimes an heirloom. But, I charge you, in this matter of old
Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit
which will be rightfully its due!" And I said to the ghost of Mr.
Surveyor Pue,--"I will!"

On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It
was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing
to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold
repetition, the long extent from the front-door of the
Custom-House to the side-entrance, and back again. Great were the
weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers and
Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully
lengthened tramp of my passing and returning footsteps.
Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that the
Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that
my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man
could ever put himself into voluntary motion--was, to get an
appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened
by the east-wind that generally blew along the passage, was the
only valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So
little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-House to the
delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained
there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the
tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have been brought before
the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would
not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with
which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative
would not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I
could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither
the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained
all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with
a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you
to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The little power
you might have once possessed over the tribe of unrealities is
gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold.
Go, then, and earn your wages!" In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not
without fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle
Sam claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched
numbness held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore
walks and rambles into the country, whenever--which was seldom
and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature, which used to give me such freshness and
activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the
threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and
weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my
study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the
deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and
the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it
might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar
room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its
figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible,
yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the
most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his
illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the
well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate
individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a
volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case;
the picture on the wall;--all these details, so completely seen,
are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose
their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire
dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little
wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;--whatever, in a word, has been
used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a
quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as
vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our
familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between
the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary
may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.
Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too
much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to
look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now
sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an
aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from
afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in
producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its
unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness
upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish
of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold
spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a
heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which
fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and
women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold--deep within its
haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished
anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of
all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther
from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an
hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all
alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like
truth, he need never try to write romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of fire-light, were just
alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more
avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of
susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them,--of no great
richness or value, but the best I had,--was gone from me.

It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order
of composition, my faculties would not have been found so
pointless and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have
contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran
shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he
did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous
gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque
force of his style, and the humorous coloring which nature taught
him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly
believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might
readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the
materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me,
to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on
creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at
every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken
by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort
would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the
opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright
transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so
heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value
that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and
ordinary characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault
was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed
dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper
import. A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf
after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by
the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as
written, only because my brain wanted the insight and my hand the
cunning to transcribe it. At some future day, it may be, I shall
remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and
write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page.

These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a
hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this
state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor
tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the
Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is
dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like
ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a
smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be
no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to
conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In
some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects.
Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer, of long
continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable
personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he
holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his
business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is of such a
sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in
every individual who has occupied the position--is, that, while
he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper
strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to
the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of
self-support. If he possesses an unusual share of native energy,
or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon
him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected
officer--fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth
betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world--may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom
happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own
ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter
along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of
his own infirmity,--that his tempered steel and elasticity are
lost,--he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest
of support external to himself. His pervading and continual
hope--a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement,
and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives,
and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments
him for a brief space after death--is, that, finally, and in no
long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall
be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else,
steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he
may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at
so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a
little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and
support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig
gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at
monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of
his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a
taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this
singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no disrespect to the
worthy old gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of
enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it
should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go
hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its
better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy,
its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to
manly character.

Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be
so utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment.
Yet my reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow
melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to
discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree
of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured
to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House,
and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest
apprehension,--as it would never be a measure of policy to turn
out so quiet an individual as myself, and it being hardly in the
nature of a public officer to resign,--it was my chief trouble,
therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the
Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old
Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life
that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this
venerable friend,--to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the
day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep
in the sunshine or the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a
man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live
throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities!
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm.
Providence had meditated better things for me than I could
possibly imagine for myself.

A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to adopt
the tone of "P. P."--was the election of General Taylor to the
Presidency. It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate
of the advantages of official life, to view the incumbent at the
in-coming of a hostile administration. His position is then one
of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency,
disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with
seldom an alternative of good, on either hand, although what
presents itself to him as the worst event may very probably be
the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and
sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of
individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom,
since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his
calmness throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness
that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious
that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits
of human nature than this tendency--which I now witnessed in men
no worse than their neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because
they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine,
as applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one
of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief, that the
active members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited
to have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for
the opportunity! It appears to me--who have been a calm and
curious observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this fierce
and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the
Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because
they need them, and because the practice of many years has made
it the law of political warfare, which, unless a different system
be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But
the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how
to spare, when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe
may be sharp, indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with
ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head
which they have just struck off.

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much
reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side,
rather than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none
of the warmest of partisans, I began now, at this season of peril
and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my
predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and
shame, that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I
saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those
of my Democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity,
beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it,
if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of
the accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested
themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was
requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of
office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat
resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of
committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with
the good hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before in
the Old Manse, I had spent three years; a term long enough to
rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old intellectual
habits, and make room for new ones; long enough, and too long, to
have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no
advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding myself
from toil that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse
in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment,
the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognized
by the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political
affairs,--his tendency to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet
field where all mankind may meet, rather than confine himself to
those narrow paths where brethren of the same household must
diverge from one another,--had sometimes made it questionable
with his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he
had won the crown of martyrdom, (though with no longer a head to
wear it on,) the point might be looked upon as settled. Finally,
little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to be overthrown
in the downfall of the party with which he had been content to
stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many worthier
men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four years
on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then to
define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating
mercy of a friendly one.

Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a
week or two, careering through the public prints, in my
decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and
grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought. So
much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this time,
with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the
comfortable conclusion, that every thing was for the best; and,
making an investment in ink, paper, and steel-pens, had opened
his long-disused writing-desk, and was again a literary man.

Now it was, that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some
little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could
be brought to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree
satisfactory. Even yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much
absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre
aspect; too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; too little
relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften
almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly,
should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is
perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and
still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is
no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's
mind; for he was happier, while straying through the gloom of
these sunless fantasies, than at any time since he had quitted
the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which contribute to
make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life,
and the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such
antique date that they have gone round the circle, and come back
to novelty again. * Keeping up the metaphor of the political
guillotine, the whole may be considered as the "POSTHUMOUS PAPERS
OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR"; and the sketch which I am now
bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person
to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a
gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the
world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies!
For I am in the realm of quiet!

*"At the time of writing this article, the author intended to
publish, along with The Scarlet Letter, several shorter tales and
sketches. These it has been thought advisable to defer."
[Author's note]

The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector,--who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and
killed by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have
lived for ever,--he, and all those other venerable personages who
sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my
view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to
sport with, and has now flung aside for ever. The
merchants,--Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram,
Hunt,--these, and many other names, which had such a classic
familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of traffic, who
seemed to occupy so important a position in the world,--how
little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not
merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I
recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise,
my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory,
a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of
the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only
imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its
homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street.
Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me;
for--though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary
efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win
myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so
many of my forefathers--there has never been, for me, the genial
atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the
best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces;
and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as
well without me.

It may be, however,--O, transporting and triumphant
thought!--that the great-grandchildren of the present race may
sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the
antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the
town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN-PUMP!

Chapter 1

The Prison-Door

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

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably
recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot
a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion
as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may
safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the
first prison-house, somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost
as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on
Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres
in the old church-yard 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 other
indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous
iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing
else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed
never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and
between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot,
much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such
unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial
in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized
society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted
almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this
month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to
offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he
went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his
doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and 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, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks
that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair
authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of
the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we
shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on
the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from
that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck
one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve,
let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be
found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale
of human frailty and sorrow.

Chapter 2

The Market-Place

The grass-plot before the jail, in 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 oaken door.
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 augured some awful
business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the
anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence
of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public
sentiment. But, 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 idle 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-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 amongst 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, appeared to take a peculiar interest in
whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had
not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained
the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into
the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, 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 has transmitted to her child
a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a
slighter physical frame, if not a 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 countrywomen;
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 its volume of tone.

"Goodwives," 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 malefactresses as this Hester
Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for
judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together,
would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful
magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow 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 God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful
overmuch,--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 Prynne's forehead. Madame Hester would have winced at
that, I warrant 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 mark as she will, the pang 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 pitiless of these
self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us
all, and ought to die. Is there no 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, goodwife," exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there
no virtue in woman, save what 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 grisly presence of the town-beadle, 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
too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had
brought it acquainted 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
neighbours. 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 with 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 taste 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 lady-like, too, after the manner of the
feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain
state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and
indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication.
And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, 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
modelled 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 beheld her for the first time,--was
that 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 inclosing her in a
sphere by herself.

"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one
of the 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 faces of our godly 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 Madam Hester's rich gown off her dainty
shoulders; and as for the red letter, which she hath stitched so
curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel, to
make a fitter one!"

"O, peace, neighbours, 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 beadle 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 ye, Mistress Prynne 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, Madam Hester, and show
your scarlet letter in the market-place!"

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators.
Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession
of stern-browed men and unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set
forth towards 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 ignominious
letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days,
from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the
prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of
some length; for, haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance
underwent an agony from every footstep of those that 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 marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer
should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present
torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With
almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed
through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of
scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. 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 as 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 of that 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 this contrivance of wood and
iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common
nature,--whatever 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 Prynne'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 proneness 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 mien, 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 Prynne'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 counsellors,
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 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 an earnest and effectual meaning.
Accordingly, the crowd was sombre 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 borne.
Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself
to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely,
wreaking 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 Prynne 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 needs 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.

Yet 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 mass of
imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially
her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up
other scenes than this roughly hewn 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, the most trifling and immaterial, passages
of infancy and 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 exhibition 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 gray 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 reverend white
beard, that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her
mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it
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 wont to gaze at it. 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 pore 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 memory's
picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the
tall, gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices,
ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental
city; where a 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 lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the
rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the
townspeople assembled and levelling 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!

Chapter 3

The Recognition

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and
universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at
length relieved by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a
figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An
Indian, in his native garb, was standing there; but the red men
were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements, that
one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne,
at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other
objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, 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 furrowed 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 mould the physical to itself, and
become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly
careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had
endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was
sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne, that one of this man's
shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant
of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the
figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom, with so convulsive a
force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the
mother did not seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw
him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was
carelessly, at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look
inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and
import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind.
Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A
writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake
gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all
its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with
some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so 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 Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she
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 townsman 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 needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered
the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage
companion; "else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester
Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I
promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's church."

"You say truly," replied the other. "I am a stranger, and have
been a wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous
mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among
the heathen-folk, to the southward; and am now brought hither by
this Indian, to be redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please
you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's,--have I her name
rightly?--of this woman's offences, and what has brought her to
yonder scaffold?"

"Truly, friend, and methinks it must gladden your heart, after
your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman,
"to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is
searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as
here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know,
was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who
had long dwelt in Amsterdam, whence, some good time agone, 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. Marry,
good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a
dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned
gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being
left to her own misguidance----"

"Ah!--aha!--I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter
smile. "So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this
too in his books. And who, by your favor, Sir, may be the father
of yonder babe--it is some three or four months old, I should
judge--which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"

"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the
Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the
townsman. "Madam Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the
magistrates have laid their heads together in vain. Peradventure
the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown
of man, and forgetting that God sees him."

"The learned man," observed the stranger, with another smile,
"should come himself to look into the mystery."

"It behooves him well, if he be still in life," responded the
townsman. "Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy,
bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and
doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall;--and that, moreover,
as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the
sea;--they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of
our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But,
in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed
Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the
platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the
remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her
bosom."

"A wise sentence!" remarked the stranger, gravely bowing his
head. "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the
ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me,
nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not, at
least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be
known!--he will be known!--he will be known!"

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and,
whispering a few words to his Indian attendan