The Scarlet Letter

This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt

much away from it both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses,

or did possess, a hold on my affection, the force of which I

have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.

Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its

flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few

or none of which pretend to architectural beauty--its

irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only

tame--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the

whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea

at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other--such

being the features of my native town, it would be quite as

reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged

checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,

there is within me a feeling for Old Salem, which, in lack of a

better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The

sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots

which my family has stuck into the soil. It is now nearly two

centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest

emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and

forest-bordered settlement which has since become a city. And

here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled

their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of

it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a

little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the

attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of

dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as

frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need

they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of

that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and

dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back

as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of

home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference

to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger

claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,

sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so

early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street

with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man

of war and peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name

is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,

legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the

Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter

persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in

their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity

towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to

be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these

were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and

made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches,

that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon

him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the

Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have

not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors

of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven

for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the

heavy consequences of them in another state of being. At all

events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby

take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse

incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and

unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back,

would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed.