The Scarlet Letter
Page 15But, 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
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 favour 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
fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent
times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little
graveyard 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.
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.