The Scarlet Letter

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of

the scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there,

there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in

that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of

ignominy. There was a sense within her--too ill-defined to be

made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind--that her whole

orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this

spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was

playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the

sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as

a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky

foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid

the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating,

but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the

restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly

indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon

and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw

anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she

flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or

thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without

yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in

requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none

the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from

the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone

through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She

ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew

conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native

audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew

into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild

men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they

gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the

sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted

with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in

the night-time.

One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had

spoken to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that

he attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a

kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a

humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain

that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl

immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy

skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it

was difficult to imagine her without it.

"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the

seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"