The Scarlet Letter

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain

summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by

a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with

their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.

Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the

history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the

bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured

some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing

short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on

whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the

verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the

Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so

indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant,

or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the

civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post.

It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox

religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or

vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous

about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow

of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress

Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die

upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same

solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as

befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost

identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly

interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public

discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed,

and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for,

from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a

penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking

infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern

a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our

story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were

several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in

whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age

had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety

restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from

stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not

unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest

to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially,

there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old

English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants,

separated from them by a series of six or seven generations;

for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother

had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate

and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not

character of less force and solidity than her own. The women who

were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than

half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had

been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.

They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native

land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely

into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone

on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and

ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had

hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New

England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech

among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would

startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport

or its volume of tone.