The Scarlet Letter

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey

steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing

hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden

edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and

studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue

and happiness they might originally project, have invariably

recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to

allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another

portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it

may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built

the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill,

almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground,

on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which

subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated

sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is

that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the

town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and

other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its

beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous

iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything

else in the New World.

Like all that pertains to crime, it

seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly

edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a

grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern,

and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something

congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower

of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal,

and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush,

covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which

might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to

the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he

came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature

could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in

history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old

wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and

oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is

fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the

footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the

prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it

so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now

about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do

otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the

reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral

blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the

darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.