The Scarlet Letter

Capítulo 1

I.

THE PRISON-DOOR.

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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 churchyard 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 anything 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 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.

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