目录
CONTENTS
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE......................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1 THE PRISON-DOOR..................................................... 1
CHAPTER 2 THE MARKET-PLACE................................................. 3
CHAPTER 3 THE RECOGNITION.................................................. 14
CHAPTER 4 THE INTERVIEW........................................................ 24
CHAPTER 5 HESTER AT HER NEEDLE........................................ 32
CHAPTER 6 PEARL.......................................................................... 43
CHAPTER 7 THE GOVERNOR’S HALL........................................ 54
CHAPTER 8 THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER................... 62
CHAPTER 9 THE LEECH................................................................. 72
CHAPTER 10 THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT............................. 83
CHAPTER 11 THE INTERIOR OF A HEART................................. 94
CHAPTER 12 THE MINISTER’S VIGIL....................................... 102
CHAPTER 13 ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER.............................. 114
CHAPTER 14 HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN........................... 123
CHAPTER 15 HESTER AND PEARL............................................ 130
CHAPTER 16 A FOREST WALK.................................................... 138
CHAPTER 17 THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER............... 145
CHAPTER 18 A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE....................................... 155
CHAPTER 19 THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE....................... 162
CHAPTER 20 THE MINISTER IN A MAZE.................................. 170
CHAPTER 21 THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY.......................... 182
CHAPTER 22 THE PROCESSION................................................. 192
CHAPTER 23 THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER....204
CHAPTER 24 CONCLUSION........................................................ 214
摘要
CHAPTER 1 THE PRISON-DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured 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 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 ironwork 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, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised 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.
