The Scarlet Letter

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed

Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution

for his sins that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk

of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should

have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim

that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no

success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever

been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than

worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs

one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of

story books! What kind of business in life--what mode of

glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and

generation--may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as

well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied

between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time!

And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their

nature have intertwined themselves with mine.

Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by

these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since

subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as

I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom

or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,

performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a

claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of

sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get

covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil.

From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the

sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from

the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took

the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray

and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.

The boy, also in due time, passed from the forecastle to the

cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his

world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with

the natal earth. This long connexion of a family with one spot,

as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the

human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in

the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not

love but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came himself from a

foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little

claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the

oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his

third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his

successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that

the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden

houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment,

the chill east wind, and the chillest of social

atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see

or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and

just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly

paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a

destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and

cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever,

as one representative of the race lay down in the grave, another

assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main

street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in

the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence

that the connexion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at

last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than

a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series

of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had

other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within

my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.