The Scarlet Letter

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my

foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part

of my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that

which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type

whereby I recognise the man. As most of these old Custom-House

officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to

them, being paternal and protective, was favourable to the

growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It

was pleasant in the summer forenoons--when the fervent heat,

that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely

communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems--it

was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of

them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen

witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came

bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jollity

of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the

intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to

do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon

the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the

green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however,

it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the

phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.

It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to

represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In

the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there

were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked

ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and

dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.

Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to

be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. But,

as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be

no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of

wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation

from their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung

away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had

enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully

to have stored their memory with the husks. They spoke with far

more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or

yesterday's, to-day's, or tomorrow's dinner, than of the

shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's

wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.

The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this

little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the

respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States--was

a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a

legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or

rather born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary

colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an

office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the

early ages which few living men can now remember. This

Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years,

or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful

specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover

in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact

figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk

and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he

seemed--not young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance of

Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no

business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually

re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous

quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting

out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a

clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal--and there was very

little else to look at--he was a most satisfactory object, from

the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and

his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all,

the delights which he had ever aimed at or conceived of. The

careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular

income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of

removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over

him. The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the

rare perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of

intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and

spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in

barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on

all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of

feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in short, but a

few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper

which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty

very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart.

He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the

father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of

childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to dust. Here, one

would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the

sunniest disposition through and through with a sable tinge. Not

so with our old Inspector. One brief sigh sufficed to carry off

the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment

he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far readier

than the Collector's junior clerk, who at nineteen years was

much the elder and graver man of the two.