The Scarlet Letter

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned

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 storey 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 labour 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.