The Scarlet Letter

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 his

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, valour were

rewarded by heraldic honour, 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 mainspring 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 forth-with, 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 anything 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.