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- The Scarlet Letter 53
- I
- The Prison-Door
-
- A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-
- crowned hats, intermixed 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 recognized 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 church-yard 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 any thing 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, pigweed, apple-peru, and such
- unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil
- The Scarlet Letter -- I. The Prison-Door 54
-
- that had so early borne the black flower of civilized 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 symbolize
- some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the
- darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
-
-