excerpt from The Scarlet Letter
Answers
Answer:
thr
ong of bearded men, in sad
–
colo
red garments and grey steeple
–
crowned hats, inter
–
mixed
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 proj
ect, 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 Bo
ston 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 se
pulchers 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 b
eetle
–
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 betwe
en it and the wheel
–
track of the
street, was a grass
–
plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig
–
weed, apple
–
pern, 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 far authority for believing, it had sprung up
under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison
–
door, we sh
all not take
upon us to determine. 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
[...].
The door of the jail was then flung open and f
rom within there appeared, in the first place, like a
black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of on usher, with a sword by
his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect
the
whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its
final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he
laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, w
hom he thus drew forward, until, on the
threshold of the prison
–
door, she repelled him, by an action marked with