The Scarlet Letter

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 eiderdown 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, 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.