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 THE SCARLET LETTER

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,

GMAT®, and AP® English Test Preparation

Nathaniel Hawthorne

PSAT is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit Scholarship
Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT is a registered trademark of the College
Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE, AP and Advanced Placement are registered
trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT is a
registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book
nor endorses this book, LSAT is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither
sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.
 The Scarlet Letter
Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,
GMAT®, and AP® English Test Preparation

Nathaniel Hawthorne

PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit
Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered trademark of the
College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are
registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book,
GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated
with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council
which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.
 ICON CLASSICS

Published by ICON Group International, Inc.

7404 Trade Street
San Diego, CA 92121 USA

www.icongrouponline.com

The Scarlet Letter: Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT®, and AP®
English Test Preparation

This edition published by ICON Classics in 2005

Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright ©2005 by ICON Group International, Inc.

Edited by Philip M. Parker, Ph.D. (INSEAD); Copyright ©2005, all rights reserved.

All rights reserved. This book is protected by copyright. No part of it may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Copying our publications in whole or in part, for whatever reason, is a violation of copyright laws
and can lead to penalties and fines. Should you want to copy tables, graphs, or other materials, please
contact us to request permission (E-mail: [email protected]). ICON Group often grants
permission for very limited reproduction of our publications for internal use, press releases, and
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International, Inc.

PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the
National Merit Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book;
SAT® is a registered trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses
this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the
Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT® is a
registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither
affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law
School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights
reserved.

ISBN 0-497-25306-2
 iii

Contents
PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR .......................................................................................... 1
EDITOR'S NOTE................................................................................................................ 3
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE — INTRODUCTORY ....................................................................... 7
CHAPTER I. THE PRISON DOOR ................................................................................... 43
CHAPTER II. THE MARKET-PLACE ............................................................................... 45
CHAPTER III. THE RECOGNITION................................................................................ 55
CHAPTER IV. THE INTERVIEW ................................................................................... 65
CHAPTER V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE....................................................................... 73
CHAPTER VI. PEARL ...................................................................................................... 83
CHAPTER VII. THE GOVERNOR'S HALL ....................................................................... 93
CHAPTER VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER................................................. 101
CHAPTER IX. THE LEECH ......................................................................................... 111
CHAPTER X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT.............................................................. 121
CHAPTER XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART ................................................................ 131
CHAPTER XII. THE MINISTER'S VIGIL ....................................................................... 139
CHAPTER XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER ............................................................... 151
CHAPTER XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN ........................................................... 159
CHAPTER XV. HESTER AND PEARL........................................................................... 167
CHAPTER XVI. A FOREST WALK................................................................................ 175
CHAPTER XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER .............................................. 183
CHAPTER XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE .................................................................. 193
CHAPTER XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE ....................................................... 199
CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE .................................................................. 207
CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY........................................................... 219
CHAPTER XXII. THE PROCESSION ............................................................................ 229
CHAPTER XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER ................................ 239
CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 249
GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................... 255
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1

PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR

Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on
standardized tests, Webster’s paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently
assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this
edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was edited for students who are actively
building their vocabularies in anticipation of taking PSAT®, SAT®, AP® (Advanced Placement®),
1
GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT® or similar examinations.

Webster’s edition of this classic is organized to expose the reader to a maximum number of
synonyms and antonyms for difficult and often ambiguous English words that are encountered in
other works of literature, conversation, or academic examinations. Extremely rare or idiosyncratic
words and expressions are given lower priority in the notes compared to words which are “difficult,
and often encountered” in examinations. Rather than supply a single synonym, many are provided
for a variety of meanings, allowing readers to better grasp the ambiguity of the English language,
and avoid using the notes as a pure crutch. Having the reader decipher a word’s meaning within
context serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. Each page covers words not
already highlighted on previous pages. If a difficult word is not noted on a page, chances are that it
has been highlighted on a previous page. A more complete thesaurus is supplied at the end of the
book; Synonyms and antonyms are extracted from Webster’s Online Dictionary.

Definitions of remaining terms as well as translations can be found at www.websters-online-

dictionary.org. Please send suggestions to [email protected]

The Editor
Webster’s Online Dictionary
www.websters-online-dictionary.org

1
PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit
Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered trademark of the
College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are
registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book,
GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated
with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council
which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 3

EDITOR'S %NOTE

Nathaniel Hawthorne was already a man of forty-six, and a tale writer of

some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet Letter" appeared. He was
born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy
and rather sombre life; of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly
uncongenial, his moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered.
Its colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his "Twice-Told Tales" and
other short stories, the product of his first literary period. Even his college days
at Bowdoin did not quite break through his acquired and inherited reserve; but
beneath it all, his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost
uncanny prescience and subtlety. "The Scarlet Letter," which explains as much
of this unique imaginative art, as is to be gathered from reading his highest
single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early and
late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The House
of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American
community as he had himself known it - defrauded of art and the joy of life,
"starving for symbols" as Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at
Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.
The following is the table of his romances, stories, and other works:

Thesaurus
divining: (adj) oracular; (n) dowsing. musing, brooding; (v) philosophical, tactlessness, coarseness, heaviness,
marvelously: (adj, adv) astonishingly, sedate. vulgarity.
amazingly, strangely; (adv) superbly, prescience: (n) forecast, precognition, uncanny: (adj) weird, eerie, strange,
magnificently, wondrously, anticipation, prevision, ghostly, unearthly, unnatural,
terrifically, fantastically, foreknowledge, forethought, vision, eldritch, mysterious, odd, frightful,
marvellously, excellently, presentiment, prediction, hunch, hideous. ANTONYMS: (adj) normal,
miraculously. ANTONYMS: (adv) insight. common, ordinary.
abysmally, terribly, unremarkably, stories: (n) tale. uncongenial: (adj) unfriendly, hostile,
incompetently, mildly, poorly. subtlety: (n) refinement, elegance, incongenial, cold, unfit, unsuited,
meditative: (adj, v) thoughtful, nuance, delicacy, craft, finesse, contrastive, chilly, cool, unsociable,
pensive; (adj) wistful, reflective, nicety, niceness, penetration, polish, distant. ANTONYMS: (adj) friendly,
broody, museful, ruminative, cunning. ANTONYMS: (n) hospitable.
4 The Scarlet Letter

Fanshawe, published anonymously, 1826; Twice-Told Tales, 1st Series, 1837;

2nd Series, 1842; Grandfather's Chair, a history for youth, 1845: Famous Old
People (Grandfather's Chair), 1841 Liberty Tree: with the last words of
Grandfather's Chair, 1842; Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; Mosses from
an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven Gables,
1851: True Stories from History and Biography (the whole History of
Grandfather's Chair), 1851 A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, 1851; The Snow
Image and other Tales, 1851: The Blithedale Romance, 1852; Life of Franklin
Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales (2nd Series of the Wonder Book), 1853; A Rill
from the Town-Pump, with remarks, by Telba, 1857; The Marble Faun; or, The
Romance of Monte Beni (4 EDITOR'S NOTE) (published in England under the
title of "Transformation"), 1860, Our Old Home, 1863; Dolliver Romance (1st Part
in "Atlantic Monthly"), 1864; in 3 Parts, 1876; Pansie, a fragment, Hawthorne' last
literary effort, 1864; American Note-Books, 1868; English Note Books, edited by
Sophia Hawthorne, 1870; French and Italian Note Books, 1871; Septimius Felton;
or, the Elixir of Life (from the "Atlantic Monthly"), 1872; Doctor Grimshawe's
Secret, with Preface and Notes by Julian Hawthorne, 1882.%
Tales of the White Hills, Legends of New England, Legends of the Province
House, 1877, contain tales which had already been printed in book form in
"Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses" "Sketched and Studies," 1883.
Hawthorne's contributions to magazines were numerous, and most of his
tales appeared first in periodicals, chiefly in "The Token," 1831-1838, "New
England Magazine," 1834,1835; "Knickerbocker," 1837-1839; "Democratic
Review," 1838-1846; "Atlantic Monthly," 1860-1872 (scenes from the Dolliver
Romance, Septimius Felton, and passages from Hawthorne's Note-Books).
Works: in 24 volumes, 1879; in 12 volumes, with introductory notes by
Lathrop, Riverside Edition, 1883.
Biography, etc. ; A. H. Japp (pseud. H. A. Page), Memoir of N. Hawthorne,
1872; J. T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," 1873 G. P. Lathrop, "A Study of
Hawthorne," 1876; Henry James English Men of Letters, 1879; Julian Hawthorne,
"Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife," 1885; Moncure D. Conway, Life of

Thesaurus
anonymously: (adv) unknownly, largely, primely, predominantly; (adj, (adj, v) inceptive, preliminary,
unidentifiedly, unspecifiedly; (adj, adv) mainly, particularly. prefatory.
adv) secretly; (adj) under another ANTONYM: (adv) partially. numerous: (adj) many, frequent,
name, pretending to be somebody edited: (adj) shortened, abridged, abundant, multiple, multitudinous,
else, in disguise, disguised, emended, formatted. copious, plentiful, innumerable,
undercover. fragment: (n) fraction, crumb, morsel, populous, great, much. ANTONYMS:
biography: (n) history, life story, life, part, division, rag; (n, v) chip, scrap, (adj) rare, occasional, scarce.
life history, memoirs, memoir, story, splinter; (v) shiver, crumble. printed: (adj) written, imprinted,
hagiography, animation, biographies, ANTONYM: (n) chunk. stamped, pressed, embossed, on
resume. introductory: (adj) elementary, paper.
chiefly: (adv) principally, primarily, incipient, basic, opening, first, remarks: (n) commentary,
above all, especially, headly, mostly, prefatorial, preparatory, prelusive; explanation.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5

Nathaniel %Hawthorne, 1891; Analytical Index of Hawthorne's Works, by E. M.

O'Connor 1882.

Thesaurus
o'connor: (n) Flannery O'Connor.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 7

THE %CUSTOM-HOUSE

—
INTRODUCTORY

It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself

and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical
impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the
public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the reader--
inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the indulgent reader or the
intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep
quietude of an Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy
enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public
by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The
example of the famous "P. P. , Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully
followed. The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth
upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his
volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than
most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than
this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect
sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were
certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete

Thesaurus
addresses: (n) wooing, suit, courtship. habitation, dwelling, abode, domicile, (adj) intolerant, unsympathetic,
autobiographical: (adj) country, dwelling house, fire, habitat. severe, restrained, harsh,
autobiographic, autobiographal. fittingly: (adv) fitly, properly, hardhearted, abstemious,
deserts: (n) desert, just deserts, due, correctly, befittingly, decently, disapproving.
compensation, comeupance. seemly, suitably, pertinently, rightly, overmuch: (n) excess, surfeit,
disinclined: (adj) reluctant, loath, aptly, becomingly. ANTONYMS: overabundance; (adj) inordinate,
averse, indisposed, loth, backward, (adv) improperly, wrongly, exorbitant, superabundant, undue;
not content, opposed, dubious, incorrectly. (adv) overly, too, unduly, too much.
afraid, not in the vein. ANTONYMS: indulgent: (adj) forgiving, gentle, quietude: (n) quietness, calmness,
(adj) tending, willing, leaning, eager, clement, lenient, soft, kind, gracious, peace, composure, placidity,
bent, keen, disposed. tolerant, merciful, compassionate; tranquility, repose, serenity,
fireside: (n) fireplace, home, family, (adj, v) permissive. ANTONYMS: tranquillity, hush, silence.
8 The Scarlet Letter

his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely
decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as
thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some
true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a
kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and
then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate
of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the
inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author,
methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights
or his own.%
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain
propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large
portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of
the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact--a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among
the tales that make up my volume--this, and no other, is my true reason for
assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main
purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of
the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the
days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but which is now burdened with
decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial
life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length,
discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her
cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide
often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of
buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--
here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From
the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each

Thesaurus
benumbed: (adj) torpid, asleep, stiff, inmost: (adj) innermost, inward, deep, prate: (n, v) gossip, chatter, prattle,
insensible, dull, dead, numbed, intimate, private, inner, interior, tattle; (v) jabber, gab, chat, natter,
hardened, drugged, uninterested, internal, personal, secret, intrinsic. clack, palaver, gabble.
cold. ANTONYM: (adj) outermost. prolix: (adj) diffuse, lengthy, wordy,
enlivening: (adj) cheerful, bracing, loftiest: (adj) uppermost, top, garrulous, copious, protracted,
genial, refreshing, invigorating, sovereign. windy, talkative, redundant, long,
thrilling, revitalizing, reviving, methinks: (adv) meseems. ponderous.
stimulating, pleasant, vitalizing. pardonable: (adj, v) defensible; (adj) unthrifty: (adj, v) improvident; (adj)
heretofore: (adv) formerly, as yet, forgivable, justifiable, venial, prodigal, thriftless, profuse,
before, so far, yet, already, until now, remissible, allowed, not heinous, unguarded, unthrift, wasteful,
previously, once, hereunto; (adv, n) understandable, veniable, explicable. dismantled, dissipated, extravagant;
hitherto. ANTONYM: (adj) unpardonable. (v) shiftless.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 9

forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating
that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam's government is here
established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden
pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps
descends towards the street Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of
the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I
recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunder- bolts and barbed arrows in
each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general
truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community;
and especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the
premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she
looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter themselves under
the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the
softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness
even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later--oftener soon than late--is apt to
fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.%
The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has grass enough growing
in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any
multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there
often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such
occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last war with
England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own
merchants and ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while
their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of
commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four
vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or South America--or
to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent
feet passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife
Thesaurus
aright: (adv) correctly, right, well, true, infinite, manifold, multiple, galling, venom; (n) anger, mordacity,
not Amis, satisfactorily, favorably, numberless, myriad, many, hate.
justly, exactly, rightly, properly. numerous, thick, populous, snugness: (n) cosiness, ease, coziness,
forenoon: (n) morning, morn, am, innumerous. neatness, comfortableness,
period, daybreak, break of the day, ornamented: (adj) embellished, orderliness, trimness, domesticity,
morning time, first light, dayspring, beautified, fancy, flowery, ornate, compactness, hominess.
a, cockcrow. adorned, bedecked, decked, truculency: (n) aggressiveness,
intermingled: (adj) amalgamated, festooned, feathered, florid. atrocity, brutality, barbarity, cruelty,
integrated, coalesced, blended, outspread: (adj) spread, extended, contentiousness, pugnacity,
incorporated, assorted, consolidated, widespread, dispersed, outstretched, inhumanity, belligerence, harshness,
incorporate, amalgamate, fused. stretched, broad, wide; (v) unfold. quarrelsomeness.
multitudinous: (adj) innumerable, rankling: (adj) rancor, virulence, vixenly: (adv) termagantly.
10 The Scarlet Letter

has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his
vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner,
cheerful, sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now
accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be
turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities such as nobody
will care to rid him of. Here, likewise--the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-
bearded, careworn merchant--we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste
of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond.
Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in quest of a protection;
or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital.
Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood
from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the
alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance
to our decaying trade.%
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with other
miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the
Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the
steps, you would discern -- in the entry if it were summer time, or in their
appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement weathers row of venerable figures,
sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against
the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking
together, ill voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy
that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who
depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or anything else but
their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew at
the receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for
apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or
office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with two of its arched
windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third

Thesaurus
aforesaid: (adj) aforenamed, said, clerical, theological. inclement: (adj, n) harsh, rugged,
foregoing, above-mentioned, same, careworn: (adj) tired, drawn, worn, boisterous; (n) austere; (adj)
preceding, former, foresaid. weary, harassed, under pressure, turbulent, grim, bleak, rigorous,
alertness: (n) watchfulness, agility, wan, pinched, stressed, fraught, bitter, rough, rigid. ANTONYMS:
alacrity, nimbleness, liveliness, bony. ANTONYM: (adj) relaxed. (adj) mild, fine, nice, calm, pleasant.
jealousy, wariness, attention, decaying: (adj) rotten, decayed, master's: (n) postgraduate degree.
quickness, intelligence, rotting, stale, decadent, stinking, snore: (n) snoring; (v) snort, saw logs,
consciousness. ANTONYMS: (n) decomposed, smelly, shabby, seedy; snooze, siesta, hibernation, breathe,
dream, drowsiness, inattentiveness, (n) fading. ANTONYM: (adj) pristine. doze, saw wood, coma, dream.
slowness, unconsciousness. germ: (n) beginning, bacterium, bud, sulks: (n) mood, sullen, doldrums,
apostolic: (adj) papal, apostolical, sprout, kernel, microbe, embryo, egg, dudgeon, dumps, hermit,
pontifical, Apostolic see, popish, bacillus, root, seed. moroseness, mumps.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 11

looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give
glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers,
around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping,
clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a
seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is
strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse;
and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a
sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop,
has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a
voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or
three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and--not to forget
the library--on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress,
and a bulky Digest of the Revenue laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling,
and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of be edifice. And
here, some six months ago--pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the
long-legged tool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and
down the columns of the morning newspaper--you might have recognised,
honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little
study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches
on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek
him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform
hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and
pockets his emoluments.%
This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on
my affection, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of
actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its
flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of
which pretend to architectural beauty--its irregularity, which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame--its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and
New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other--such being
Thesaurus
ascends: (v) ascend, uprise. maturer: (adj) overripe, ripe, ripened. regular, dry, undiversified,
besom: (n, v) broom; (n) brush; (v) seaport: (n) harbor, harbour, port, port undeviating; (v) harping, unreversed,
sieve, screen, shovel, rake, filter, of call, docks, oasis, coaling station. unstopped, unrevoked, iterative.
mop, riddle. slovenliness: (n) slatternliness, ANTONYMS: (adj) varied,
decrepit: (adj) infirm, senile, feeble, shagginess, negligence, untidiness, diversified.
effete, seedy, worn, dilapidated, inaccuracy, neglect, carelessness, wearisomely: (adv) irksomely,
shabby, old, rickety, frail. slovenry, unkemptness. boringly, dully, drearily,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fit, strong, sound, thither: (adv) hither, whither, on that troublesomely, monotonously,
robust, powerful, healthy, hearty, point, in that respect, at that place, in longly, wearily, tediously,
sturdy. that location; (adj) further, ulterior, wearyingly, uninterestingly.
gossiping: (adj) gabby, garrulous, remoter, succeeding, more distant. womankind: (n) womanhood, gentle
scandalous; (n) gossipmongering. unvaried: (adj) unchanged, uniform, sex, people.
12 The Scarlet Letter

the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a

sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though
invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for Old Salem, which,
in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is
probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has stuck into
the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the
earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest--
bordered settlement which has since become a city. And here his descendants
have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil,
until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame
wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment
which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my
countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps
better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.%
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first
ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was
present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts
me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in
reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a
residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-
crowned progenitor-who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode
the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man
of war and peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard
and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in
the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a
bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their
histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their
sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds,
although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood
may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his
dry old bones, in the Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they
Thesaurus
assignable: (adj) negotiable, alienable, (adj) light, bright, sunny, radiant, persecutor: (n) tormentor, bully,
conveyable, allocatable, movable, clear. gadfly, tormenter, teaser, pursuer,
referable, exchangeable, emigrant: (adj, n) immigrant; (n) dictator, annoyer, tantalizer, pesterer,
transferrable, ascribable, convertible. immigration, expatriate, emigree, pest.
disarranged: (adj) disheveled, migrant, emigre, refugee, migrator; roots: (n) heredity, family, origin, line,
disorderly, untidy, deranged, (adj) foreigner, alien, novus homo. extraction, ancestry.
disturbed, delirious, disordered, ANTONYMS: (n) settler, aborigine. unworn: (adj) unallayed, unwithered,
unkempt, tousled, topsy-turvy, legislator: (n) lawgiver, representative, unshaken, not habituated, not
mussy. ANTONYM: (adj) neat. congressman, deputy, filibuster, familiar, lately manifested, fresh,
dusky: (adj) dark, cloudy, gloomy, frontbencher, backbencher, modern, new, new scenes, recent.
black, swarthy, dull, murky, obscure, crossbencher, statist, statemonger, ANTONYM: (adj) worn.
dingy, sooty, somber. ANTONYMS: parliamentarian. wherewith: (adv) therewith, herewith.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 13

have not crumbled utterly to dust I know not whether these ancestors of mine
bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or
whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in
another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative,
hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred
by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the
race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and
henceforth removed.%
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would
have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that, after so long a lapse
of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it,
should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I
have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine--if my
life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success--would they
deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?"
murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story
books! What kind of business in life--what mode of glorifying God, or being
serviceable to mankind in his day and generation--may that be? Why, the
degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments
bandied between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time And
yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined
themselves with mine.
Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two
earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in
respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy
member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to
public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here
and there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the
accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they
followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the

Thesaurus
bough: (n) arm, limb, bow, member, loafer, loiterer, loon, shirker, regrettable, unimpressive,
tigella, ramage, offshoot, layabout, lounger, vagabond; (v) lamentable, poor, despicable.
ramification, spray, sprig, stem. dawdle. repent: (v) deplore, bewail, rue,
crumbled: (adj) rotten, fragmented. intertwined: (prep) clasped together, mourn, lament, atone, sorry, bemoan,
deem: (v) believe, assume, consider, interlocked, interfolded; (adj) related, feel remorse, grieve, be sorry.
count, hold, think, feel, view, matted, inseparable, disheveled, topmost: (adj) highest, upmost, upper,
suppose, regard, imagine. tangled, entangled. maximum, uppermost, head,
ANTONYMS: (v) disregard, doubt. laudable: (adj) commendable, supreme, utmost, crowning, apical,
forefathers: (n) patriarchs, forefather, creditable, admirable, praiseworthy, uttermost. ANTONYM: (adj) bottom.
ancestor, colony, lineage, family. worthy, deserving, good, honorable, unprosperous: (adj) unfortunate,
hereby: (adv) thereby, whereby. meritorious, applaudable, estimable. improsperous, disadventurous,
idler: (n) lazybones, laggard, bum, ANTONYMS: (adj) shameful, needy, impecunious, failing, poor.
14 The Scarlet Letter

quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place
before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered
against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also in due time, passed from the
forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal
earth. This long connexion of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and
burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite
independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround
him. It is not love but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came himself from a
foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little claim to be called a
Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster--like tenacity with which an old
settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that the place is
joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust,
the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social
atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are
nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal
spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of
character which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one representative of
the race lay down in the grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march
along the main street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in the
old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connexion,
which has become an unhealthy one, should at least be severed. Human nature
will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too
long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had
other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall
strike their roots into accustomed earth.%
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,
unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a place in Uncle
Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else.
My doom was on me, It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone
Thesaurus
connexion: (n) conjunction, connector, (adj) active, industrious, vigorous, squatter, planter, newcomer,
connective, connection, association, diligent. colonizer, sockdolager, standish.
bond, concatenation, join, linkage, joyless: (adj) cheerless, gloomy, ANTONYM: (n) native.
link, junction. dreary, dark, sad, melancholy, sire: (v) generate, engender, beget,
grandsire: (n) grandfather, ancestor. funereal, comfortless, dolorous, procreate, mother, get, make; (n)
homestead: (n, v) farm; (n) home, doleful, desolate. ANTONYMS: (adj) forefather, ancestor, patriarch, pater.
abode, farmhouse, farmstead, joyous, happy. tempestuous: (adj, n) rough,
dwelling, habitation, estate, demesne, kindred: (adj) cognate, akin, similar, boisterous, severe; (adj) raging,
homestall, house. allied, related; (n) kin, consanguinity, furious, wild, angry, windy, fierce,
indolent: (adj) idle, lazy, slothful, relation, folk, folks, kin group. gusty; (adj, v) turbulent.
sluggish, careless, slow, dull, torpid, settler: (n) migrant, colonist, ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, moderate,
inert, drowsy, listless. ANTONYMS: immigrant, inhabitant, homesteader, relaxed.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 15

away--as it seemed, permanently--but yet returned, like the bad halfpenny, or as

if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning I
ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President's commission in my
pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my
weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.%
I doubt greatly--or, rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any public
functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military line, has ever had
such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as myself. The whereabouts
of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled when I looked at them. For upwards
of twenty years before this epoch, the independent position of the Collector had
kept the Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which
makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier--New England's most
distinguished soldier--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services; and,
himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations through
which he had held office, he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an
hour of danger and heart-quake General Miller was radically conservative; a
man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself
strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when
change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking
charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient sea-
captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on every sea, and standing up
sturdily against life's tempestuous blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook,
where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presidential
election, they one and all acquired a new lease of existence. Though by no means
less liable than their fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some
talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was
assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of
making their appearance at the Custom-House during a large part of the year;
but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or
June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and
convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge
of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of
Thesaurus
betake: (v) wend, apply, address, liberality: (n, v) charity, almsgiving; soundly, hardly, substantially,
accost, get, obtain, refer, acquire, aim, (adj, n) bounty; (n) largess, stalwartly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
beget, attach. munificence, benevolence, lightly, flimsily, slightly.
functionary: (n) officer, official, clerk, beneficence, generousness, tolerance; torpid: (adj) inactive, sluggish,
employee, agent, Mandarin, (adj) largesse, gift. ANTONYM: (n) indolent, dull, slow, dormant, lazy,
incumbent, appointee, bailiff, beadle, illiberality. dead, lifeless, flat, supine.
bureaucrat. rheumatic: (adj) rheumatoid, creaky, ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, lively.
gouty: (v) torminous; (adj) podagrous, arthrodynic, creaking, decrepit, vicissitude: (adj) fluctuation; (n)
podagrical, arthritical; (n) gout. palsied, stiff; (n) sufferer, variation, mutation, innovation,
halfpenny: (adj) feather, bulrush, old rheumatism, diseased person. reverse, turn, revolution, novelty,
son, jot, pinch of snuff, peppercorn, sturdily: (adv) strongly, firmly, stoutly, transition, alteration, alternation.
rap; (n) bawbee, doit, farthing. solidly, robustly, hardily, powerfully, ANTONYM: (n) stagnation.
16 The Scarlet Letter

the republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their

arduous labours, and soon afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been
zeal for their country's service--as I verily believe it was--withdrew to a better
world. It is a pious consolation to me that, through my interference, a sufficient
space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into
which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to
fall. Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the
road to Paradise.%
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their venerable
brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and though a faithful
Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his office with any reference to
political services. Had it been otherwise--had an active politician been put into
this influential post, to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig
Collector, whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of
his office--hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official
life within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-
House steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would have been
nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads
under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern that the old
fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same
time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent, to see a
furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the
glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days, had been wont to
bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas himself
to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all established rule--
and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for
business--they ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in
politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I
knew it, too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge.
Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my incumbency, to
Thesaurus
ashy: (adj) wan, ashen, pale, sallow, incivility, affront, contempt, responsibility, chargeship, liability,
pallid, grey, livid, gray, cadaverous, contumely, insult, abruptness, living, situation.
pasty, white. brusqueness, impudence, bad pained: (adj) offended, aggrieved,
bellow: (n, v) shout, growl, yell, cry, manners. ANTONYMS: (n) distressed, displeased, sore, grieved,
snarl, scream, howl, call, holler; (v) politeness, civility. miserable, injured, wounded,
bawl; (n) bay. ANTONYMS: (v) furrowed: (adj) wrinkled, lined, worried, upset. ANTONYM: (adj)
murmur, mutter. wrinkly, crumpled, corrugated, unaffected.
deservedly: (adv) justly, condignly, corrugate, furrowy, porcate, rugged, verily: (adj, adv) really; (adv) indeed, in
worthily, rightfully, rightly, right, uneven. ANTONYM: (adj) reality, genuinely, quitely, actually,
justifiably, by merit, correctly, fairly, unfurrowed. selfly, truely, identically, exactly;
becomingly. incumbency: (n) administration, (adv, int) in truth.
discourtesy: (n) indignity, rudeness, benefice, office, duty, post, place, weather-beaten: (adj) gnarled, rugged.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 17

creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They
spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their
chairs tilted back against the walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the
forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-
stories and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns
among them.%
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no great
harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts and the happy consciousness of being
usefully employed--in their own behalf at least, if not for our beloved country--
these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of office.
Sagaciously under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels
Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the
obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers Whenever
such a mischance occurred--when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had
been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their
unsuspicious noses--nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which
they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing--wax,
all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their
previous negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their
praiseworthy caution after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of
the promptitude of their zeal the moment that there was no longer any remedy.
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

Thesaurus
awaking: (n) waking, awakening. noonday: (n) noontide, noon, high sagaciously: (adv) wisely, astutely,
lightsome: (adj, v) light; (adj) blithe, noon, hour, twelve noon, afternoon; sapiently, judiciously, politicly,
lighthearted, blithesome, cheerful, (v) tide; (adj) meridional. prudently, cleverly, sharply,
sunny, gay, nimble, airy, happy, obtuseness: (n) bluntness, dulness, perceptively, sagely, discreetly.
jocund. stupidity, dimness, ignorance, sentiments: (n) breast.
liquefied: (adj) liquid, melted, stolidity, density, heaviness, thousandth: (adj) millesimal; (n)
flowing, watery, molten, runny, drowsiness, impenetrability, simple fraction.
liquefiable, fluid; (v) liquescent. obtusity. ANTONYM: (n) acuteness. unsuspicious: (adj) innocent,
mischance: (n) calamity, mishap, promptitude: (n) expedition, speed, credulous, trustful, unwary,
disaster, accident, ill luck, bad luck, readiness, promptness, velocity, confiding, honest, gullible, easy,
misfortune, adversity, affliction, luck, haste, agility, rapidity, celerity, naive, not suspicious, that confides.
chance. hurry, dispatch. ANTONYM: (adj) wary.
18 The Scarlet Letter

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
Thesaurus
arrayed: (adj) armored, panoplied, gaiety; (adj) jocundity. ANTONYMS: thawed: (adj) liquified, unfrozen.
clothed, clad, armed; (v) habited, (n) seriousness, misery. unction: (n) salve, ointment, balm,
accustomed. locks: (n) hair, tresses, head of hair. unguent, gusto, anointment,
dotage: (adj, n) fatuity; (n) senility, mouldering: (adj) moldering, inspiration, smarm, cream,
second childhood, old age, age, becoming rotten, rotten, rotting. oleaginousness, smarminess.
decrepitude, imbecility, feebleness, phosphorescent: (adj) bright, light, wearisome: (adj, v) tiresome, irksome,
insanity, years; (adj) second glowing, fluorescent, phosphoreous; troublesome; (adj) tedious, dull,
childishness. ANTONYM: (n) (v) meteoric, in a blaze, ablaze, monotonous, boring, laborious,
adolescence. blazing, rutilant, relucent. trying, slow, annoying. ANTONYMS:
jollity: (adj, n) glee, joviality; (n) shipwreck: (n, v) ruin; (adj, v) sink; (v) (adj) satisfying, soothing, exciting,
merriment, cheerfulness, festivity, defeat, scuttle, destroy, fail; (n) hulk, refreshing, easy.
frolic, gladness, hilarity, mirth, accident, wreckage, wrack, ruination. witticisms: (n) facetiae.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 19

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.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier
curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was,
in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so
Thesaurus
admixture: (n) mixture, composite, tinge, steep, dye, fill, impregnate, sable: (adj) black, dark, dusky, sombre,
alloy, addition, fusion, additive, pervade, instill, inoculate. murky, mournful; (n) ebony, fur,
mixing, amalgam, mix, commixture, quaver: (n, v) quiver, quake, shake, blackness, marten, pitch black.
melange. shudder, shiver, tremble; (n) tremor, strutting: (n) boasting, stiffening,
cackle: (n, v) giggle, snicker, chatter; eighth note; (v) warble, flutter, bracing; (adj) boastful.
(v) gaggle, crow, chortle; (adj) prattle, flicker. wholesomeness: (n) salubrity,
prate; (n) laugh, yack, laughter. respectably: (adv) creditably, decently, nutritiveness, uprightness, goodness,
graver: (v) style, denominate, entitle, honorably, properly, appropriately, hygiene, modesty, nutritiousness,
fashion; (n) engraver, graving tool. admirably, commendably, quality, respectability,
healthfulness: (n) salubrity, decorously, fitly, justly, becomingly. salubriousness, morality.
salubriousness, health. ANTONYMS: (adv) indecently, ANTONYMS: (n) unwholesomeness,
imbue: (v) infuse, saturate, permeate, disreputably, dishonorably. impurity.
20 The Scarlet Letter

delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My

conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already
said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his
character been put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency,
but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be
difficult--and it was so--to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthly and
sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to
terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher
moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of
enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness
and duskiness of age.%
One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren
was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion
of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait;
and to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As
he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual
endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight
and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate
on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing
them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of
the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig or turkey under one's very
nostrils. There were flavours on his palate that had lingered there not less than
sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton
chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his
lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for
worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were
continually rising up before him--not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for
his former appreciation, and seeking to repudiate an endless series of enjoyment.
at once shadowy and sensual, A tender loin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a
spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be
remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events
Thesaurus
delusive: (adj) deceptive, false, cheerfulness, splendor. inscrutable, ethereal,
misleading, fallacious, untrue, unreal, duskiness: (n) dimness, gloom, inapprehensible, elusive.
imaginary, fictitious, delusory, vain, swarthiness, dark, semidarkness, ANTONYMS: (adj) tangible, definite.
illusory. ANTONYMS: (adj) truthful, murkiness, gloominess, obscurity, reminiscences: (n) memoirs.
real, honest, genuine, actual, evening; (adj) fresco, coolness. subserve: (v) aid, assist, help, promote,
authentic. expatiate: (v) expand, dilate, enlarge, minister, conduce, contribute, benefit,
devoured: (adj) eaten up. amplify, expound, elaborate, distend, tend, minister to, intervene.
dreariness: (n) desolation, tedium, exemplify, exposit; (adj, v) inflate; withal: (adv) nevertheless,
dullness, gloominess, boringness, (adj) descant. notwithstanding, however, even so,
dulness, depression, boredom, impalpable: (adj) imperceptible, all the same, nonetheless, with; (adj)
sadness, bleakness, gloom. shadowy, invisible, efflorescent, likewise; (n) sufficiency, adequacy,
ANTONYMS: (n) brightness, gritty, insubstantial, incorporeal, enough.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 21

that brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as
little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old
man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which
lived and died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure,
but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would
make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an axe and
handsaw.%
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad to dwell
at considerably more length, because of all men whom I have ever known, this
individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing to
causes which I may not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this
peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it; and, were he to
continue in office to tile end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and
sit down to dinner with just as good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House portraits
would be strangely incomplete, but which my comparatively few opportunities
for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the
Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military service,
subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come
hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and honourable
life.
The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his three-score
years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened
with infirmities which even the martial music of his own spirit-stirring
recollections could do little towards lightening. The step was palsied now, that
had been foremost in the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and
by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across
the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit,
gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came and
went, amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of

Thesaurus
ascend: (n, v) mount; (v) arise, scale, inveterately: (adv) obstinately, bad luck, catastrophe.
uprise, climb, go up, come up, stubbornly, habitually, confirmedly, palsied: (adj) paralyzed, disabled,
increase, elevate; (n) ascending, rootedly, ingrainedly, persistently, motionless, unsteady, weak,
ascent. ANTONYMS: (v) descend, oldly, fixedly, permanently, setly. comatose, unconscious; (v) paralyse,
drop, decline, fall, lower, set, sink. lightening: (v) lighten, lightning; (n) paralyze, withered.
balustrade: (n) fence, banisters, mitigation, change of color, rustle: (n, v) whisper; (v) lift, buzz,
banister, bannister, barrier, handrail, whitening, alleviation, brightening, steal, pilfer, whiz, pinch, abstract,
pale, balusters, guardrail, consolation, assuagement; (adj) thieve, purloin; (n) rustling.
circumvallation, ring fence. comforting, fulgurant. toilsome: (adj) arduous, hard, difficult,
carcase: (n) body, skeleton, dead body. mishap: (n) adversity, misfortune, strenuous, backbreaking, severe,
hither: (adv) here, whither, casualty, mischance, misery, heavy, painful, tough, grueling; (adj,
hitherward, thither. calamity, misadventure, disaster, ill, v) wearisome.
22 The Scarlet Letter

business, and the casual talk of the office; all which sounds and circumstances
seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into
his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and
kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed
out upon his features, proving that there was light within him, and that it was
only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in
their passage. The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the
sounder it appeared. When no longer called upon to speak or listen--either of
which operations cost him an evident effort--his face would briefly subside into
its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for,
though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework of his
nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumpled into ruin.%
To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages, was
as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old
fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey and broken ruins. Here and
there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be
only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown,
through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection--for, slight as was the
communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and
quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,--I could discern
the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities
which showed it to be not a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a
distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized
by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse
to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an
adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fail. The heat
that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never
of the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze; but rather a deep red glow, as of
iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness--this was the expression of his
repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him at the period of which

Thesaurus
cumbrous: (adj) unwieldy, weighty, ANTONYMS: (adv) precisely, (n) composure, ease, quiet, leisure,
massive, heavy, bulky, awkward, audibly, coherently, distinctly. recreation, relaxation; (v) lay.
ponderous, clumsy, vexatious, obstructed: (adj) blind, blocked, ANTONYMS: (n, v) work; (n)
burdensome, inept. congested, impeded, impedite, foiled, activity, panic, agitation.
imbecility: (n) folly, foolishness, tight, thwarted, stymied, frustrated, subside: (v) diminish, decline, abate,
idiocy, fatuity, weakness, stupidity, impassable. ANTONYM: (adj) lessen, fall, sink, calm, descend,
feeblemindedness, lunacy; (adj, n) unobstructed. collapse, dip, settle. ANTONYMS: (v)
debility, feebleness; (adj) infirmity. perchance: (adv) maybe, possibly, by strengthen, excite.
indistinctly: (adv) vaguely, dimly, chance, peradventure, accidentally, uncheerful: (adj) cheerless, drabber,
hazily, mistily, inarticulately, incidentally, mayhap, chance, drear, dreary, gloomy, lacking cheer,
shadowily, obscurely, unclearly, haphazard, probably, haply. disconsolate, unwilling, grim, drab,
fuzzily, confusedly, ambiguously. repose: (n, v) recline, peace, lie, calm; dismal. ANTONYM: (adj) cheerful.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 23

I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness--roused by a trumpets real, loud enough
to awaken all of his energies that were not dead, but only slumbering--he was
yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the
staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in
so intense a moment his demeanour would have still been calm. Such an
exhibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor
desired. What I saw in him--as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile--was the features of
stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to
obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other
endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or
unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence which, fiercely as he led
the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp
as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain
men with his own hand, for aught I know--certainly, they had fallen like blades
of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to which his spirit imparted
its triumphant energy--but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so
much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not
known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make an
appeal.%
Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the least forcibly to
impart resemblance in a sketch--must have vanished, or been obscured, before I
met the General. All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent;
nor does nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have
their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she
sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect
of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humour, now
and then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and glimmer
pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom seen in the
masculine character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's
fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be
Thesaurus
adorn: (v) deck, dress, embellish, quench, douse, stifle. food, fare, diet, nutrient, nutrition,
ornament, beautify, enrich, grace, evanescent: (adj) passing, temporary, alimentation, feed, nurture, meat,
trim, garnish, gild, blazon. fleeting, transitory, fugitive, meal.
ANTONYMS: (v) mar, disfigure, momentary, transient, cursory, obstinacy: (n) stubbornness, firmness,
deform, deface, damage, hurt. temporal, intangible, short-lived. bullheadedness, determination,
aught: (n) nil, zero, anything, ought, kindliness: (n) friendliness, geniality, contumacy, mulishness, impenitence,
cypher, nix, cipher, naught, null, zip; amiability, grace, benignancy, mercy, resolve, resoluteness, impenitency,
(adj) any. tenderness, compassion, charity, pertinacity. ANTONYMS: (n)
awaken: (v) arouse, wake, rouse, call, consideration, helpfulness. cooperation, compliance.
stir, kindle, get up, raise, wake up, ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, scythe: (n) crotch, crutch, crane,
waken, revive. ANTONYMS: (v) reserve, cruelty. elbow, ankle, fluke, groin, knee,
dampen, calm, retire, suppress, spoil, nutriment: (n, v) nourishment; (n) zigzag; (n, v) sithe; (v) reap.
24 The Scarlet Letter

supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one who
seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe.%
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while the
Surveyor--though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon himself the
difficult task of engaging him in conversation--was fond of standing at a
distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He
seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though
we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched
forth our hands and touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life
within his thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's
office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old
heroic music, heard thirty years before--such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were
all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-
masters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle
of his commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about
him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain
the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an old sword--now
rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright
gleam along its blade--would have been among the inkstands, paper-folders, and
mahogany rulers on the Deputy Collector's desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier--the man of true and simple energy. It
was the recollection of those memorable words of his--"I'll try, Sir"--spoken on
the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul and
spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering
all. If, in our country, valour were rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase--
which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger
and glory before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest of all
mottoes for the General's shield of arms. It contributes greatly towards a man's
moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with
individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and

Thesaurus
comprehending: (adj) intelligent, re-creating: (v) re-create. brawl. ANTONYMS: (n) peace, push,
general, observant, sympathetic, renewing: (adj) renewal, restorative, serenity, order, calm.
brotherly, conversant. reviving, recuperative, promoting uncouth: (adj) rough, rude, barbarous,
evolutions: (n) evolution. recuperation, grateful, revitalising, vulgar, crude, awkward, clumsy,
floral: (adj) flowered, mossy, flower. revitalizing. gross, unrefined, ungainly, common.
hardihood: (v) audacity; (n) courage, slumberous: (adj) soporific, ANTONYMS: (adj) refined, couth,
daring, boldness, temerity, somnolent, drowsy, sleepy, lethargic, polite, sophisticated, pleasant,
fearlessness, fortitude, brass; (adj, n) quiet, somniferous, heavy, proper, genteel.
face, guts; (n, v) assurance. soporiferous, sluggish, torpid. valour: (n) valor, valiancy, valiance,
ANTONYMS: (n) frailty, timidity. tumult: (adj, n, v) hubbub, disturbance; heroism, courage, bravery,
heraldic: (adj) communicative, (n) stir, commotion, bustle, din, fuss, valorousness, prowess, daring, pluck,
communicatory. excitement; (n, v) clamor, disorder, spirit.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 25

abilities %he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have
often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than
during my continuance in office. There was one man, especially, the observation
of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically
those of a man of business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw
through all perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish as
by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-
House, it was his proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so
harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity
of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal
of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the
mainspring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an
institution like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit
and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the
duty to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is
not in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so
did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met
with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity-
-which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime--would he
forth-with, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear
as daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His
integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a
principle; nor can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so
remarkably clear and accurate as his to be honest and regular in the
administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came
within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the
same way, though to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an
account, or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word--and
it is a rare instance in my life--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the
situation which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position
Thesaurus
comprehended: (adj) understood, ANTONYMS: (n) impatience, ANTONYM: (n) native.
apprehended. intolerance. mainspring: (n) motive, spring,
condescension: (n) arrogance, fulness: (n) fullness, entirety, primum mobile, reason, ground,
lordliness, disparagement, patronage, completeness, totality. inducement, coil, grounds,
affability, disdain, pride, harassing: (adj) troublesome, carking, incitement, keystone, fountain.
superciliousness, contempt, stoop, galling, thorny, vexatious; (v) perforce: (n) on compulsion; (adv)
depreciation. ANTONYMS: (n) bothering, pestering, tormenting, needs.
respect, acceptance, admiration. worrying, annoy, harass. wand: (n, v) stick, rod; (n) scepter,
forbearance: (n) patience, clemency, interloper: (adj, n) stranger, alien; (n) verge, mace, pole, baton, sceptre,
pardon, abstention, abstinence, encroacher, trespasser, invader, fasces, rod of empire; (v) staff.
mercy, longanimity, avoidance, boarder, bodkin, foreigner, wheels: (n) vehicle, truck, car, brush,
postponement, indulgence, restraint. gatecrasher, go between, unknown. force.
26 The Scarlet Letter

so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it
whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable
schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years
within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free
days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen
boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and
Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy
with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with
poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearthstone--it was time, at length, that I should
exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I
had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a
change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence,
in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential
part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could
mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at
the change.%
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my regard.
I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me. Nature--except it
were human nature--the nature that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one
sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight wherewith it had been
spiritualized passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been
departed, was suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been
something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay
at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true,
indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long;
else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without transforming
me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never
considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic
instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a
new change of custom should be essential to my good, change would come.

Thesaurus
fastidious: (adj, n) exacting, critical, freedom, immunity, permission, nurture, sustain, aliment, cherish,
accurate; (adj) delicate, particular, forgiveness. ANTONYM: (n) liability. feed, maintain, cultivate; (n, v) cradle.
careful, exigent, dainty, inanimate: (adj) defunct, dull, ANTONYMS: (v) starve, sap.
discriminating, nice, fussy. breathless, inorganic, inactive, transitory: (adj) transient, temporary,
ANTONYMS: (adj) sloppy, lifeless, exanimate, deceased, extinct, fleeting, momentary, brief,
unfastidious, careless, uncouth, unconscious, spiritless. ANTONYMS: ephemeral, temporal, fugacious,
uncritical, easy, indifferent, (adj) living, animate, spirited. impermanent, fugitive, transitive.
undemanding, slapdash, relaxed, mingle: (v) compound, combine, ANTONYMS: (adj) permanent,
easygoing. merge, amalgamate, intermix, mix, lasting.
imbued: (adj) addicted, alive, instinct, commingle, associate, confuse, join, unutterably: (adv) ineffably,
full. intermingle. ANTONYM: (v) part. inexpressibly, indescribably, beyond
impunity: (n) impune, come off, nourish: (v) foster, keep, bring up, words, deeply, overwhelmingly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 27

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have been
able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and
sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those qualities), may, at
any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble.
My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official
duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light,
and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever
read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had
read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same
unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each
of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson--
though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame,
and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means,
to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to
find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves,
and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the
way of warning or rebuke; but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives
me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost
me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is
true, the Naval Officer--an excellent fellow, who came into the office with me,
and went out only a little later--would often engage me in a discussion about one
or the other of his favourite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector's
junior clerk, too a young gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered
a sheet of Uncle Sam's letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards)
looked very much like poetry--used now and then to speak to me of books, as
matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered
intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.%
No longer seeking or caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The Custom-
House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and
baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable
merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and
Thesaurus
conversant: (adj) proficient, knowing, embossed. lecture, check; (v) castigate, berate;
informed, familiar, versed, learned, lettered: (adj, v) erudite; (adj) learned, (n) admonition. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
cognizant, conscious, erudite, educated, enlightened, literate, praise, compliment; (v) commend,
experienced, skilled. ANTONYMS: knowledgeable, scholarly, knowing, acknowledge, approve; (n) approval.
(adj) unfamiliar, oblivious, literary; (v) instructed, leaned. stencil: (n) templet, matrix, template,
inexperienced. longer: (adj) longest, better, lengest; similarity, category, cycle, device,
dutiable: (adj) taxable, nonexempt, (adv) farther; (n) yearner, thirster. original.
customary, customable, chargeable. pang: (n) pain, torture, ache, agony, unprofitable: (adj) profitless, fruitless,
impost: (n) custom, tax, customs, twinge, affliction, sting, stab, distress, futile, inutile, disadvantageous,
customs duty, toll, dues, cess, excise, ailment, cramp. unfruitful, barren, idle, vain,
Scot, sess, stone. rebuke: (n, v) reprimand, rebuff, uneconomic, unproductive.
imprinted: (adj) printed, marked, reproach, chide, blame, reproof, ANTONYMS: (adj) fruitful, lucrative.
28 The Scarlet Letter

gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a
knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it had
never been before, and, I hope, will never go again.%
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again.
One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in
me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to offer the
public the sketch which I am now writing.
In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in which the
brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and
plaster. The edifice--originally projected on a scale adapted to the old
commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity
destined never to be realized--contains far more space than its occupants know
what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector's apartments,
remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its
dusky beams, appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At
one end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon
another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar
rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days, and
weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers,
which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this
forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But then, what
reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the dulness of official formalities,
but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts--
had gone equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in
their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and--saddest of all--without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the
Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen. Yet not
altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history. Here, no doubt,
statistics of the former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials
of her princely merchants--old King Derby--old Billy Gray--old Simon Forrester--

Thesaurus
awoke: (adj) awakened. outpour, efflux, outburst, exudation, ungainly, ponderous, maladroit,
bygone: (adj) ancient, former, gone, extrusion, exhalation, emanation, gruelling, hulking, accented, all
obsolete, outmoded, previous, emission, flow. thumbs, unwieldy; (n) logging.
archaic, old, late; (n) preterite, encumbrance: (n) check, hindrance, ANTONYMS: (adj) nimble, adroit,
antique. ANTONYMS: (adj) future, load, burden, barrier, impediment, agile, graceful, elegant, dainty.
current, coming, modern. tie, obstacle, imposition, charge, memorials: (n) memoir.
dulness: (n) dullness, matt, dreariness, onus. quantities: (n) quantity.
dimness, bluntness, flatness, festoon: (n) swag, wreath, festoonery, sorrowful: (adj) melancholy, doleful,
boringness, vapidity, jejunity, mat, decoration, bouquet, catenary; (v) sad, rueful, lugubrious, gloomy,
tedium. ANTONYMS: (n) brightness, decorate, deck, adorn, ornament, dreary, grievous, piteous, unhappy,
asperity. beautify. mournful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
effusion: (n) effluence, eruption, lumbering: (adj) heavy, clumsy, cheerful, content, joyful, successful.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 29

and many another magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was
scarcely in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The
founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of
Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their
traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what
their children look upon as long-established rank,
Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier documents and
archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried off to Halifax,
when all the king's officials accompanied the British army in its flight from
Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to
the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references
to forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-
heads in the field near the Old Manse.%
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some
little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner,
unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had
long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants
never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy
tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant
interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity--and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
towns brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the
way thither--I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a
piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an official record
of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal
chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was something
about it that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red
tape that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be
brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to
be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favour of one

Thesaurus
bestow: (v) give, confer, grant, impart, cleared. ANTONYM: (adj) unfamiliar. bored, distracted, indifferent,
contribute, donate, apply, award; dwindle: (v) abate, diminish, decline, unconcerned, uninterested,
(adj, v) accord, allow, present. decrease, contract, recede, fade, fall, inattentive, carefree.
ANTONYMS: (v) deprive, refuse, lessen, reduce, wane. ANTONYMS: exerting: (n) push.
withhold, retrieve, withdraw. (v) mushroom, accumulate, enlarge, foundered: (v) swamped, cast away,
chirography: (n) pencraft, calligraphy, expand, extend, grow, strengthen, shipwrecked, nonsuited, grounded,
autography, handwriting, rise. wrecked, stranded.
penmanship, hand, writing, book, engrossed: (adj) rapt, engaged, intent, mossy: (adj) floral, mosslike, moldy,
authorship. occupied, preoccupied, busy, hoary, musty, covered, musciform,
decipherable: (adj) legible, clear, fascinated, obsessed, thoughtful, stodgy, hoar, chromatic, canescent.
readable, clean, intelligible, hooked; (adj, v) immersed. rotted: (adj) roted, crappy, icky, lousy,
identifiable, familiar, absolved, ANTONYMS: (adj) disinterested, rotten, unsound.
30 The Scarlet Letter

Jonathan Pine, as Surveyor of His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, in the
Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's
"Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago;
and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the digging up of his
remains in the little graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor,
save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic
frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory
preservation. But, on examining the papers which the parchment commission
served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's mental part, and the internal
operations of his head, than the frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull
itself.%
They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at
least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand. I could
account for their being included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by
the fact that Mr. Pine's death had happened suddenly, and that these papers,
which he probably kept in his official desk, had never come to the knowledge of
his heirs, or were supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the
transfer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public
concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.
The ancient Surveyor--being little molested, suppose, at that early day with
business pertaining to his office--seems to have devoted some of his many
leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a
similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would
otherwise have been eaten up with rust.
A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the preparation of
the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The
remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not
impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem,
should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task.
Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and

Thesaurus
antiquarian: (adj) antique, ancient. enclose, wrap, encircle, conceal, (v) restrain, discourage, prevent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) young, modern, embrace, beset, hide; (n) envelope. lumber: (n) timber, wood; (adj, n)
new. ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, release, jumble, rubbish; (v) log, trail; (adv, v)
apparel: (n, v) garb, attire, garment, open, unwrap, expose. plod; (adj) junk, litter, huddle,
array, vesture; (n) clothing, finery, frizzle: (v) crimp, frizz, fry, crinkle, disarray.
costume, clothes; (v) adorn, clothe. crape, crumple, wrinkle, plicate; (n) molested: (adj) assaulted, disordered,
decease: (v) go, die, perish, pass, pass friz; (adj) bow, recurve. abused, badly treated, battered,
away, exit, expire; (n) demise, frizzled: (adj) kinky. harmed, injured, maltreated,
passing, departure, expiration. heirs: (n) family, posterity, issue. neglected, physically abused, raped.
ANTONYMS: (n) nascency; (v) impel: (v) coerce, constrain, force, pertaining: (adj) relative, concerning,
survive. carry, compel, goad, urge, stimulate, belonging, apposite, material, not
envelop: (v) fold, enfold, encase, actuate, animate, push. ANTONYMS: absolute.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 31

competent, to take the unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition I

contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object
that most drew my attention to the mysterious package was a certain affair of
fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There were traces about it of gold
embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none, or
very little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive,
with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies
conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be
discovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth--for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other
than a rag--on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter.%
It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb proved to
be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there
could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn,
or what rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a
riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I
saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly
there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation, and which, as
it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to
my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.
When thus perplexed--and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the
letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to
contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians--I happened to place it on my breast.
It seemed to me--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word--it seemed
to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so,
as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I
shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected
to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted. This I
now opened, and had the satisfaction to find recorded by the old Surveyor's pen,

Thesaurus
cogitating: (n) conception; (adj) bright, neat, brilliant, interesting, mysterious, occult, cryptical, cryptic,
reflective. smart. esoteric, inscrutable, weird, magical;
contrive: (v) plan, invent, design, drew: (n) move, John Drew. (adj, n) psychic.
concoct, devise, cast, concert, evading: (n) avoidance, escaping, needlework: (n) stitchery, sewing,
excogitate, frame, formulate; (n, v) dodging; (v) evade; (adj) intangible, needlecraft, stitching, knitwork,
manage. ANTONYMS: (v) demolish, fugitive. crochet, crocheting, knit, knitting,
destroy, ruin, waste, wreck, fail. frayed: (adj) threadbare, shabby, fancywork, creation.
defaced: (adj) marred. ragged, tattered, thin, torn; (adj, v) sacrilegious: (adj) blasphemous,
dingy: (adj) dark, black, drab, dull, dilapidated; (v) secondhand, wilted, impious, disrespectful, heretical,
muddy, impure, dim, seedy, dowdy, shaken, stale. ANTONYMS: (adj) irreligious, ungodly, godless,
unclean, grimy. ANTONYMS: (adj) pristine, new, smart. hardened, heterodox, wicked; (adj, v)
immaculate, spotless, sparkling, mystic: (adj, v) secret, recondite; (adj) irreverent. ANTONYM: (adj) pious.
32 The Scarlet Letter

a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair. There were several

foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation
of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy
personage in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period
between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth
century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as
a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been
her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of
voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking
upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart,
by which means--as a person of such propensities inevitably must--she gained
from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was
looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this singular
woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled "THE
SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne carefully in mind that the main facts
of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor
Pue. The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself--a most curious
relic--are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them I must
not be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining
the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it,
I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half-a-
dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such
points, nearly, or altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of
my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.%
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There
seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient
Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig-
-which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave--had bet me in the
deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who
Thesaurus
affirming: (adj) predicative, predicant, slate, paper; (n) cap. perish: (v) expire, pass away, decease,
assertory; (n) confirmation. garb: (n, v) dress, apparel, array, go, fade, decay, depart, fall, pass,
authenticated: (adj) genuine, true, real, garment; (n) attire, clothing, costume, ruin, annihilate. ANTONYMS: (v)
valid, authentic, official, legal, frock, outfit, clothes; (v) clothe. survive, live, appear.
documented, authoritative, groundwork: (n) bottom, basis, base, personage: (n) person, notable,
legitimate. foundation, bed, ground, footing, celebrity, personality, individual,
doings: (n) conduct, behavior, bedrock, fundament, background, bigwig, figure, somebody, human,
behaviour, deportment, demeanour, substructure. character, being.
proceeding, episode, traffic; (v) act, immemorial: (adj) ancient, respecting: (prep) about, regarding,
deed, job. prescriptive, pristine, primaeval, apropos, as regards, pertaining to;
foolscap: (v) table, vellum, tablet, primeval, traditional, old, eternal, (adj) relative, not absolute,
marble, papyrus, parchment, pillar, customary. pertaining, referring, loving.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 33

had borne His Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a
ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas
the hangdog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels
himself less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own
ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the
scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own
ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty
and reverence towards him--who might reasonably regard himself as my official
ancestor--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.
"Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head
that looked so imposing within its memorable wig; "do this, and the profit shall
be all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in
mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But I
charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's
memory the credit which will be rightfully due" And I said to the ghost of Mr.
Surveyor Pue--"I will".%
On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was the
subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my
room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the
front door of the Custom-House to the side entrance, and back again. Great were
the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers and
Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp
of my passing and returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits,
they used to say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably
fancied that my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man
could ever put himself into voluntary motion--was to get an appetite for dinner.
And, to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally
blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable
exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-house to the delicate
harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten
Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would
ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished
Thesaurus
dazzlingly: (adv) glitteringly, property, legacy, heritage, intelligibly.
splendidly, glaringly, fulgently, inheritance, principal, museum piece, oftentimes: (adv) frequently, ofttimes,
vividly, dazzle, brightly, brilliantly, plant, estate; (adj, n) valuable. oft, frequent, repeatedly, much, a
garishly, luminously, magnificently. hundredfold: (adj) centuple. great deal. ANTONYM: (adv) rarely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) dimly, dully. moth-eaten: (adj) shabby, obsolete, traversing: (n) traverse,
filial: (adj) dutiful. aged, old, threadbare, stale, outdated, perambulation, crossing; (adj)
hangdog: (adj) guilty, shamefaced, boring, ancient, mangy, hackneyed. moving.
ashamed, bullied, browbeaten, obscurely: (adv) cloudily, darkly, unmercifully: (adv) pitilessly,
cowed, stealthy, embarrassed, vaguely, secretly, hazily, abstrusely, remorselessly, unpityingly,
intimidated, sheepish, afraid. foggily, mysteriously, indistinctly, unrelentingly, ruthlessly, cruelly,
ANTONYM: (adj) proud. occultly, unclearly. ANTONYMS: relentlessly, unsparingly, hardly,
heirloom: (n) fixtures, antique, (adv) clearly, comprehensibly, heartlessly, inclemently.
34 The Scarlet Letter

mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with
which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be
warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my
intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared
me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What
have you to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The little power you
might have once possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone You have bartered
it for a pittance of the public gold. Go then, and earn your wages" In short, the
almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not
without fair occasion.%
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed
as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held possession of me.
It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever--
which was seldom and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought,
the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same
torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home,
and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study.
Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only
by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary
scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-
hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be
deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the
carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely
visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the most
suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its
separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or
two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall--

Thesaurus
brightening: (n) blooming, polishing, tonic, brisk, healthy, wholesome, infinitesimally, diminutively, nicely,
limb, illumination, first blush, break cordial, benign, curative, crisp, exactly, microscopically.
of day. fascinating. ANTONYMS: (adj) noontide: (n) noon, midday, high
glimmering: (n) inkling, ghost, soporific, soothing, relaxing, tiring, noon, summit, top, apex, zenith,
luminosity, light, hint, apparition, dull, debilitating, deadly. acme, pinnacle, climax, culmination.
radiance; (adj) glittering, glimmery, kindle: (adj, v) inflame; (v) fire, excite, torpor: (n) lethargy, lassitude, stupor,
crepusculous, sciolism. arouse, burn, flame, awaken, incite, languor, indolence, sluggishness,
illusive: (adj) deceptive, false, enkindle, stir; (n, v) light. listlessness, torpidity, torpidness;
delusive, imaginary, fallacious, ANTONYMS: (v) enkindle, dampen, (adj, n) inactivity, inertia.
unreal, seeming, ostensible, apparent, calm, extinguish, quench, stifle. ANTONYMS: (n) energy, vigor,
fanciful, fantastic. minutely: (adv) precisely, in detail, activity.
invigorating: (adj) exhilarating, fresh, closely, tinily, smally, insignificantly, warmed: (adj) warmer, warm, baked.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 35

all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that
they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby.
A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse--
whatever, in a word, has been used or played with during the day is now
invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as
vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land,
where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without affrighting us. It would be
too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us
and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of
this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.%
The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in producing the effect
which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room,
with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam upon
the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold
spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and
sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons tip. It
converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-
glass, we behold--deep within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further
from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with
this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,
and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in my regard;
and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow-

Thesaurus
anthracite: (n) hard coal, carbon, color, pinkness. ANTONYM: (n) trifling: (adj) paltry, slight, petty,
charcoal, coke, wallsend, coal, pallor. negligible, immaterial, worthless,
anthracite coal. smouldering: (adj) live, angry. trivial, minor, small; (adj, v)
firelight: (adj) light, rushlight, strangeness: (n) oddity, oddness, inconsequential; (adj, n) frivolity.
starlight. quaintness, peculiarity, curiousness, ANTONYMS: (adj) significant,
moonshine: (adj, n) moonlight, abnormality, weirdness, foreignness, worthwhile, major, considerable,
rubbish; (adj) moonbeam, bosh, queerness, singularity, quirk. crucial, enormous, great, mature,
moonglade; (n) bootleg, moon, rot, all ANTONYMS: (n) familiarity, profound, substantial; (n)
talk, corn liquor, nonsense. nativeness. importance.
ruddiness: (n) flush, rosiness, glow, tallow: (n) grease, lard, oil, suet, whit: (n) iota, atom, shred, scintilla,
complexion, skin color, rubicundity, cream, butter, cicatrix, beef tallow, smidgen, tittle, jot, bit, particle,
redness, color, complection, high dubbin, animal oil, scar. smidgin; (adj) dab.
36 The Scarlet Letter

candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no

great richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me.%
It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the
narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to
laughter and admiration by his marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous colouring which
nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly
believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might readily have
found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life
pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another
age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at
every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the
rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to
diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and
thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the burden that began to
weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay
hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with
which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was
spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I had not
fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf
after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the
flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted the
insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some future day, it may
be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write
them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page.
These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only conscious
that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was
no occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a

Thesaurus
faculties: (n) mother wit. untowardly, nosily, unbefittingly, importance, tangibility, reality,
flitting: (adj) fleeting, fugitive, unfortunately. element, essential nature,
momentary, transient, ephemeral; (v) marvelous: (adj) wonderful, fantastic, groundwork, vital part, materialness.
migration. incredible, fabulous, extraordinary, ANTONYM: (n) immateriality.
humourous: (adj) humorous. tremendous, grand, astonishing, opaque: (adj) dense, muddy, obscure,
inefficacious: (adj) ineffective, futile, terrific, great; (adj, v) prodigious. cloudy, hazy, murky, thick,
inefficient, bootless, useless, ANTONYMS: (adj) ordinary, unintelligible, milky, misty, vague.
inoperative, inutile, null, feckless, mundane, abysmal, bad, dreadful, ANTONYM: (adj) transparent.
nugatory, fruitless. unworthy, dire, humdrum, transcribe: (n, v) copy, reproduce; (v)
intrusively: (adv) meddlesomely, unimpressive, unremarkable, boring. record, transliterate, note, put down,
obtrusively, impertinently, pryingly, materiality: (n) corporeality, write down, write, paraphrase; (n)
meddlingly, curiously, busily, substantiality, concreteness, duplicate, imitate.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 37

writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good
Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or
exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every
glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be
no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in
reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favourable to the
mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop
these effects. Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of long
continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for
many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and
another, the very nature of his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is
of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.%
An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual
who has occupied the position--is, that while he leans on the mighty arm of the
Republic, his own proper strength, departs from him. He loses, in an extent
proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of
self-support. If he possesses an unusual share of native energy, or the
enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited
powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer--fortunate in the unkindly shove
that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world--may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He
usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust
out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he
best may. Conscious of his own infirmity--that his tempered steel and elasticity
are lost--he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support
external to himself. His pervading and continual hope--a hallucination, which,
in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him
while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments
him for a brief space after death--is, that finally, and in no long time, by some
happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith,
more than anything else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever
Thesaurus
betimes: (adv) early, soon, anon, rath, phial: (n) ampoule, bottle, cruet, tolerably: (adv) well enough, passably,
betime, ahead of time, rathe. ampul, ampule, noggin, caster, flask, acceptably, reasonably, enough,
enervating: (adj) enfeebling, stoup. moderately, to a tolerable degree,
weakening, debilitative, debilitating, proportioned: (adj) attemperate, pretty, to an adequate degree; (adj,
weaken, tedious, causing debilitation, shapely, regular, properly adapted, adv) somewhat; (adj) pretty well.
taxing. even, balanced. ANTONYM: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adv) unbearably,
exhaling: (adj) expiring, ending, dying, asymmetrical. intolerably, unacceptably,
breathing. residuum: (n) remainder, residue, unreasonably, insufficiently,
pervading: (adj) penetrating, general, residual, rest, draff, end, difference, inadequately.
profound, permeating, permeant, balance, eternal rest; (adj) caput unstrung: (adj) nervous, asthenic,
overmastering, lowly, deeply felt, mortuum, sprue. discomposed, overwrought,
intellectually deep, deep, almighty. steals: (adj) stolen; (n) stealing. adynamic; (v) weakly.
38 The Scarlet Letter

enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at
so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence,
the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for
his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made
happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's
pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect
a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no
disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of
enchantment like that of the devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well
to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not
his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and
constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly
character.%
Here was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the Surveyor brought the
lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either by
continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not the most
comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into
my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of
detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how
much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To
confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension--as it would never be a
measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being
hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign--it was my chief trouble,
therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and
become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the
tedious lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with
this venerable friend--to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to
spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the
shade? A dreary look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition
of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had
meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
Thesaurus
accrued: (adj) increased. impertinence, neglect, blasphemy, connecting.
attributes: (n) nature, property. impudence, disdain, insolence; (n, v) moil: (n, v) labor, grind, work; (v) fag,
constancy: (n) allegiance, devotion, insult, slight; (v) disesteem. drudge, labour, churn, travail, dig,
resolution, fidelity, loyalty, ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect; (n) boil; (n) sweat.
steadfastness, faithfulness, admiration, regard, value, reverence, prying: (adj) inquisitive, meddlesome,
steadiness, firmness, perseverance, politeness, civility, approval, nosy, inquiring, nosey, intrusive,
unchangeableness. ANTONYMS: (n) decency, seriousness. busy, snoopy; (n) nosiness, curiosity;
inconstancy, inconsistency, ejectment: (n) eviction, ouster, (adj, n) meddling. ANTONYMS: (adj)
changefulness, instability, disloyalty, expulsion, ejection, conclusive apathetic; (n) apathy.
unfaithfulness, unreliability, evidence, action of ejectment, writ of self-reliance: (n) confidence,
dishonesty. ejectment. assurance, independence, manhood,
disrespect: (n) contempt, cheek, involving: (prep) linking, between, enterprise.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 39

A %remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to adopt the tone

of "P. P. "--was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essential, in
order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the
incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His position is then one
of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a
wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very
probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and
sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who
neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must
needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one
who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the
bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious
that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting
harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of
one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active members
of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our
heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me--who
have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many
triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take
the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of
many years has made it the law of political warfare, which unless a different
system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the
long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare when
they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its
edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to
kick the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to
congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the triumphant one.
Thesaurus
bloodthirstiness: (n) murderousness, fearfulness, base fear, cowardship. shamefully, discreditably,
blood lust, cruelty, bloodiness. ANTONYMS: (n) nerve, bravery, dishonorably, scandalously,
calmness: (n) calm, composure, daring, determination. dishonourably, opprobriously,
quietness, poise, serenity, stillness, disagreeable: (adj) nasty, offensive, infamously, basely, vilely, foully.
quiet, silence, placidity, peace; (adj, n) uncomfortable, distasteful, ill-will: (n) enmity.
coolness. ANTONYMS: (n) anxiety, cantankerous, cross, ungrateful, irksome: (adj, v) wearisome, tiresome;
nervousness, restlessness, panic, fury, abhorrent, horrible, bad, painful. (adj) boring, dull, annoying, tedious,
unrest, intensity, discomposure, ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant, friendly, trying, burdensome, bothersome,
bustle, annoyance, noise. amiable, inoffensive, acceptable, irritating, prosaic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cowardice: (n) dastardliness, desirable, easygoing, happy, delightful, pleasant, refreshing,
poltroonery, pusillanimity, fear, pleasing, sweet, nice. soothing.
spirit, cravenness, timidity, ignominiously: (adv) disgracefully, metaphors: (n) images, descriptions.
40 The Scarlet Letter

If, %heretofore, l had been none of the warmest of partisans I began now, at this
season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my
predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame that,
according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of
retaining office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined
to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater
part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and
consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of
the accident which has befallen him. In my particular case the consolatory topics
were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my meditations a
considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In view of my previous
weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat
resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide,
and although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the
Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years--a term long
enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break off old intellectual habits,
and make room for new ones: long enough, and too long, to have lived in an
unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human
being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled an
unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious
ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognised by
the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs--his tendency to
roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather
than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same
household must diverge from one another--had sometimes made it questionable
with his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the
crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the point
might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more
decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been
content to stand than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many worthier men
Thesaurus
according: (adj) pursuant, consonant, prim, proper; (adj, v) becoming, consideration, cogitation.
equal, agreeable, harmonious, seemly, comely. ANTONYMS: (adj) misfortunes: (n) misfortune.
conformable, consistent, impolite, improper, misbehaving, unceremonious: (adj) informal,
corresponding, respondent; (adv) unsuitable, unrefined, relaxed, familiar, casual, abrupt, uncivil,
correspondingly, accordingly. inappropriate, rowdy, undignified, ungracious, rough, sharp, curt,
brethren: (n) congregation, assembly, defiant, unseemly. unceremonial, bluff. ANTONYMS:
brother, people, laity, family, flock, futurity: (n) hereafter, futurition, (adj) formal, gracious.
fold. timing, millennium, offing, future unquiet: (adj) restless, anxious,
consolatory: (adj) consoling, soothing, tense, afterlife, time to come; (v) Int nervous, turbulent, unsettled,
cheering. he womb of time. ANTONYMS: (n) disturbed, fussy, tumultuous; (v)
decorous: (adj) decent, appropriate, past, pastness. movable, saltatory, shifting.
conventional, sedate, correct, modest, meditations: (n) contemplation, ANTONYM: (adj) quiet.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 41

were falling: and at last, after subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile
administration, to be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the
yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly one.%
Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or two
careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's
Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a political
dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being all this
time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the
comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best; and making an
investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had opened his long-disused writing
desk, and was again a literary man. Now it was that the lucubrations of my
ancient predecessor, Mr. Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long
idleness, some little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could
be brought to work upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to
my eye, a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by genial sunshine;
too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every
scene of nature and real life, and undoubtedly should soften every picture of
them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped
itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's mind:
for he was happier while straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies
than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles,
which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honours of public life, and the
remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that
they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the
metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the
POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch
which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person
to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from

Thesaurus
cheerfulness: (n) glee, happiness, flowery, symbolic, allusive, graphic, ebullition, tumult, digestion.
exhilaration, hilarity, mirth, not literal; (n) tropical. ANTONYMS: straying: (n) digression, departure,
merriment, gladness, cheer, good (adj) factual, nonfigurative. error; (adj) errant, mistaking,
spirits, pleasure, joviality. idleness: (n) lethargy, laziness, torpor, containing error, incorrect,
ANTONYMS: (n) sadness, grimness, inactivity, idling, unemployment, misleading, astray, mistaken,
seriousness, misery, resentment, sloth, inaction, inertia, faineance, erroneous.
uncheerfulness, solemnity, lethargy, idlesse. ANTONYMS: (n) energy, subsisting: (adj) extant, living.
bleakness, gravity, gloominess. activity, bustle, liveliness, sunless: (adj) cloudy, dark, cheerless,
decapitated: (adj) decollated, headless. responsibility. clouded, lightless, gloomy,
excused: (adj) privileged, immune. seething: (v) ebullient; (adj) irate, tenebrous, mentally disordered,
figurative: (adj) metaphorical, figural, raging, enraged, spitting mad, beside blurred.
emblematic, representative, florid, yourself, teed off, packed; (n) toils: (n) net, cobweb, meshes, mesh.
42 The Scarlet Letter

beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world My blessing on my friends My
forgiveness to my enemies For I am in the realm of quiet
The life of the Custom--House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector--who, by-the-bye, l regret to say, was overthrown and killed by a horse
some time ago, else he would certainly have lived for ever--he, and all those
other venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but
shadows in my view: white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used
to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever. The merchants-- Pingree,
Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt--these and many other names,
which had such classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of
traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world--how little
time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but
recollection It is with an effort that
I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old
native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding
over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown
village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden
houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere
else. My good townspeople will not much regret me, for--though it has been as
dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their
eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so
many of my forefathers--there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere
which a literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be
said, will do just as well without me.%
It may be, however--oh, transporting and triumphant thought I--that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the
scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites
memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN
PUMP.

Thesaurus
abode: (n) dwelling, house, residence, genial: (adj) cheerful, bright, affable, ANTONYM: (n) conciseness.
place, domicile, lodge, abidance, cordial, amiable, nice, friendly, ripen: (v) grow, ripe, age, season,
mansion, lodging, address, seat. convivial, warm, agreeable, suave. fructify, elaborate, cultivate; (adj, v)
antiquary: (n) antiquarian, expert, ANTONYMS: (adj) disagreeable, maturate; (n) maturation; (adj)
archaeologist, antiquist. hostile, mean, discourteous, frosty, perfect, bring to perfection.
disconnect: (v) divide, abstract, cut off, gloomy, reserved, unapproachable, scribbler: (n) writer, penman, pen,
disengage, separate, deactivate, abominable. author, the scribbling race, hack,
disjoin, divorce, dissociate, sever, killed: (n) casualty; (adj) fallen. scrivener, Augustin Eugene scribe,
turn off. ANTONYMS: (v) attach, prolixity: (n) verbosity, verbiage, scribe, pamphleteer, journalist.
associate, continue, link, hook, join, flatulence, prolixness, verbalization, townspeople: (n) town, borough,
engage, couple, hitch, unite. lengthiness, verboseness, diffuseness, township, municipality.
efforts: (n) pains. copiousness, length, circumlocution. unpicturesque: (adj) ugly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 43

CHAPTER I.

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 recognised 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

Thesaurus
accordance: (n) harmony, agreement, decorous, ceremonious. seasonably: (adv) early, patly, early
conformity, unison, concordance, edifice: (n) building, structure, house, fruit, fitly, forth with, fortunately,
coincidence, accordancy, admission, hall, fabric, aviary, bagnio, happily, incidentally, pat, timely,
fitness, consensus, concent. bathhouse, abattoir, bawdyhouse, betimes. ANTONYM: (adv)
allot: (v) assign, distribute, apportion, clubhouse. unseasonably.
dispense, grant, deal, administer, oaken: (adj) woody. studded: (adj) muricated, bristling,
portion, allow, set, split. ponderous: (adj) heavy, grave, peopled, crowded, manifold,
ANTONYMS: (v) retain, disallow, onerous, burdensome, massive, multinominal, multiple, multiplied,
keep, refuse, reject, take. unwieldy, bulky, stodgy, hard, multitudinous, populous; (v)
bareheaded: (adj) hatless, bare, bald, tedious, dull. ANTONYMS: (adj) freckled.
unclothed, alone; (v) cap in hand, elegant, graceful, lively, brisk, timbered: (adj) wooden, forested.
obsequious, respectful, reverential, manageable. women: (n) sex, gentle sex.
44 The Scarlet Letter

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-pern, 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.%
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 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 symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the
track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow

Thesaurus
burdock: (n) suffrutex, bur, great threatening. ANTONYMS: (adj) personify, epitomize, make up, play,
burdock, Arctium, clotbur, cocklebur, favorable, promising, lucky. stand for.
genus Arctium. pluck: (adj, n) nerve; (v) cull, jerk, unsightly: (adj) repulsive, hideous,
frailty: (adj, n) foible, fragility, gather, pick, fleece, grab; (n) grit, unpleasant, unattractive, uncomely,
weakness, fault, defect, imperfection, courage, boldness; (n, v) pull. unlovely, unseemly, disagreeable,
failing, deficiency; (n) feebleness, ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice, nasty, homely, plain. ANTONYMS:
frailness, infirmity. ANTONYMS: (n) gutlessness; (v) undercharge. (adj) beautiful, nice, pleasing, pretty,
stamina, hardiness, hardihood, sainted: (adj) saintlike, holy, beatific, appealing, attractive.
sturdiness, robustness, health. angelical, angelic, sacred, cherubic,
inauspicious: (adj) unlucky, sinister, good.
adverse, untoward, ill, unfortunate, symbolise: (v) represent, symbolize,
unfavorable, ill-omened, evil, bad, exemplify, mean, be, signify,
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 45

CHAPTER %II.

THE MARKET-PLACE

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning,
not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the
inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped
oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of
New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of
these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could
have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some rioted culprit,
on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public
sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this
kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-
servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil
authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be that an
Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of
the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had
made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of
the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-
tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case,
there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the
Thesaurus
firewater: (n) liquor, alcohol, booze, arguably, doubtfully. solemnity: (n) seriousness, sobriety,
bathtub gin, juice. religionist: (n) coreligionist, prophet, earnestness, formality, ceremony,
heterodox: (adj) heretical, unorthodox, missionary, missioner, churchgoer, impressiveness, austerity, sedateness,
dissident, profane, lawless, sectarian, believer; (adj) pietist, precisian, display, pomp, grandeur.
Sadducee, Sabian, Rosicrucian, magi, Methodist, puritan, sabbatarian. ANTONYMS: (n) humor, levity,
gymnosophist. riotous: (adj) disorderly, turbulent, cheerfulness, understatement.
indubitably: (adv) certainly, surely, boisterous, insubordinate, lawless, undutiful: (adj) impious, disrespectful,
positively, incontrovertibly, insurgent, tumultuous, rebellious, unfilial; (v) unduteous.
unquestionably, clearly, dissolute, profuse, profligate. vagrant: (adj, v) stray, roving, itinerant,
undoubtedly, of course, absolutely, ANTONYMS: (adj) orderly, Peripatetic, rambling; (n) tramp,
indisputably, decidedly. manageable, peaceful, tranquil, hobo, drifter, wanderer; (v) unsettled,
ANTONYMS: (adv) possibly, gentle, conventional. erratic. ANTONYM: (n) resident.
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
convince you that we mean to be friends, and all the better friends
because we are rivals.”
Frank took the offered hand, passing it on to Clancy, who came up
at that moment.
“There’s no sense in being at loggerheads, Lenning,” said Frank.
“You may be sure that we’ll soon visit your camp.”
Intuitively, Frank had felt that Jode Lenning’s clutching fingers
reflected anything but a genial nature. He could not help but think
that Lenning was acting a part, and for Hawtrey’s exclusive benefit.
“I’m going to make it a point, my lads,” put in the colonel jovially,
“to be present at all your contests. And,” he added, “I’m looking
forward to a little wholesome excitement.”
Just at that moment Parkman, the straggler, arrived in the camp.
There was a queer expression on his face as he sidled up toward
Lenning, turning away suddenly when he found the colonel’s eyes
upon him.
“Got here at last, eh, Parkman?” observed Hawtrey pleasantly. “I
suppose you were mending some of your gear. It’s a good thing to
overhaul your football equipment occasionally and make sure that
everything is in proper trim for use.”
A blank look crossed Parkman’s face, but vanished when he
caught a significant glance from Lenning.
“That’s right, sir,” said Parkman, and walked away.
“I heard,” spoke up Lenning, “that Darrel met with an accident
yesterday. I—I hope it wasn’t serious?”
He threw a doubtful look at the colonel as he put the question.
The colonel seemed to be paying little attention to what was said,
and yet Frank felt sure that he saw a glint of sudden anxiety rise in
his eyes.
 “Broken arm, that’s all,” replied Merry. “Darrel will be all right in a
few weeks.”
“You’d better take your crowd out for a little signal practice, Jode,”
suggested the colonel. “I’ll go with you. It will soon be time for the
game,” he finished, looking at his watch.
“Good idea, sir,” assented Lenning; and called to the Gold Hill
players.
With the colonel at his side, Lenning led the way toward the mesa.
Parkman dodged along at their heels, seeking a chance for a word in
private with Lenning, but finding none.
“Say, Chip,” said Clancy, when the Gold Hillers had vanished over
the edge of the mesa, “when I took Lenning’s hand I felt as though I
had a fistful of cold fish. Allow me to repeat what I said before—that
Lenning person is strictly nig.”
“Let it go at that, Clan,” answered Merry. “The rest of the Gold
Hillers are all right.”
“It’s a hard job, making friends with that outfit,” said Handy,
coming up just then and mopping the sweat from his face.
“Everybody’s under a good deal of a strain, and most of the Gold
Hillers seem to be taking their cue from Lenning. He’s a pill.”
“Sugar-coated,” grinned Clancy, “when the colonel’s around.”
“He makes me sick,” grunted Handy bluntly. “We’ve taken the
colonel on for referee,” he continued, to Merriwell, “by way of
showing our good will. Let’s go up on the mesa and get busy. I’ll be
glad as blazes when this game is over with.”
“Them’s my sentiments, too, old man,” added Clancy, dropping in
beside Merriwell as the Ophir team started for the field.
Gold Hill won the toss. The wind was at its back, and a Gold Hill
toe lifted the ball far into the field.
 The game was on. From the side lines, Merriwell and Clancy were
watching every move with keen, critical eyes.
 CHAPTER XXII.
SHARP WORK.

“The Gold Hillers shape up well, Chip,” remarked Clancy. “So far as
beef is concerned, they put it all over our lads.”
“Headwork does more than ‘beef’ to win a game, Clan,” replied
Merriwell confidently. “Look at Brad, will you!”
Hannibal Bradlaugh, playing half back for the Ophir team, had
caught the ball and run it back twenty yards before he was downed.
In another moment came the first scrimmage. Neither Clancy nor
Merry had any time for further talk, just then, so anxious were they
not to miss a single detail of the play.
Brad tried to get through the center. He gained a little, and Handy,
captain and full back, went around the end for a couple of yards.
The Gold Hill line was putting up a good defense, and both Merriwell
and Clancy were finding time to note the work of Lenning, at right
guard.
“Remember how he beat the pistol in the race with Darrel?”
Clancy said to Merriwell. “If Lenning was tricky in one thing you’ll
find him tricky in all. He’ll try something or other here, if I’m any
prophet, Chip.”
“Not while the colonel is watching him, Clan,” Merry answered.
Handy retreated, and kicked. The colonel, carried away by the
game and perhaps forgetting that an impartial spirit was to be
looked for in a referee, was shouting excitedly and urging the Gold
Hillers to do their best, and applauding their resistance.
 Merriwell was eager to learn whether the Ophir fellows could hold
the rival eleven as well as Gold Hill had held their Ophir opponents.
The players crouched, then, as though touched by an electric wire,
flung into action. The result was a disappointment, for Gold Hill had
gone through the Ophir line for five yards.
The colonel’s excitement increased. He was cheering his club
frantically when he suddenly seemed to remember his official
position, and put a damper on his ardor.
“Hold them, Ophir!” whooped Clancy. “You’re just as good as they
are! Aren’t you going to hold ’em?”
This urging seemed to have no effect, for there was another play,
and this time the ball went through for a seven-yard gain.
“Well, well!” muttered Merry. “What do you think of that?”
There followed a fierce drive at center, and Joe Mayburn let the
runner get past him for ten yards. Clancy was dancing around like a
wild man. Handy was doing all he could to steady the boys, but it
was plain that they were badly rattled by the sharp work of the other
team.
Another play was aimed at center, but Mayburn was on his mettle,
and the attack was thrown off.
“Bully work, Mayburn!” roared Merry. “That’s the style!”
“I guess they don’t find Mayburn so easy as they thought,”
chuckled Clancy. “There they go again,” he added.
And again Gold Hill failed. Confidence was returning to the Ophir
men.
“They’re getting their nerve back,” commented Merriwell. “Oh, I
guess we’ll show those fellows that Ophir is a different crowd to-day
from what it was a year ago. Now let Gold Hill kick.”
 The way Ophir came up the field was beautiful to see. Savagely
Gold Hill fought for every yard of the way. After two downs and a
total gain of twenty yards, Handy tried for a field goal and missed.
The colonel waved his hat, and then calmed himself into the correct
official impassiveness. A little later, he blew the whistle.
“Fifteen minutes?” cried Clancy. “Thunder, Chip, it seems more like
fifteen seconds to me.”
“The colonel’s holding the watch,” laughed Merry, “so he must
have it pretty nearly right.”
“We ought to have a full sixty-minute session out of this. Why the
deuce did Handy stipulate that only two quarters were to be
played?”
“His head was level. A little of this sort of thing is a great plenty—
with the real game some three weeks off.”
Parkman moved over toward Lenning, who was walking from the
field. The two sat down to rest on a heap of bowlders close to the
edge of the mesa.
The colonel, his face beaming, made directly for Merriwell and
Clancy.
“It’s as even a thing, Merriwell,” he exclaimed, “as you’d find
anywhere! You’ve done wonders with this Ophir eleven. If I wasn’t
so old and warped with rheumatism I’d take a hand in it myself. Why
don’t you get into it?”
The colonel did not wait for an answer, but saw Handy coming up
and turned in his direction.
“I’d like an hour of this, Handy,” he cried. “Why don’t you let ’em
box the compass for the limit?”
Handy looked at Merriwell, and what he saw in the latter’s face
convinced him that his stipulations were fully approved.
 “I don’t want to work our boys too hard, just at the present time,
colonel,” said he. “The first quarter ended with the ball in the center
of the field, and with everything pretty well balanced, so far as I
could make out.”
Merriwell, seeing Bradlaugh beckon to him, left Clancy and Handy
talking with the colonel, and moved over to hear what Brad had to
say.
“Chip,” whispered Brad excitedly, “there’s a hen on!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Lenning is up to some dirty move or other, that’s
what I mean.”
“Bosh! I’ve been watching him like a weasel, and I——”
“I don’t mean during the play,” Brad interrupted, “but over there
on that rock pile where he’s been talking with Parkman.”
“What’s happened?”
“I was over there myself, stretched out for a little rest. I was on
one side of the bowlders, and those two came up and sat on the
other side. Parkman handed Lenning something. ‘That’s from
Bleeker,’ I heard him say, ‘and he says it contains some hot news
about Darrel and Merriwell.’ That’s all that was said. Parkman
sneaked off as though he was afraid some one would see him. I got
up to move away, and looked back, to see Lenning reading a note.
His face was savage. He made as though he’d tear up the note, then
changed his mind and pushed it in between the lacings of his jacket.
What do you suppose is going on?”
“Whatever it is, Brad,” answered Merriwell calmly, “it’s none of my
business.”
“But Parkman mentioned your name and Darrel’s. Certainly it is
some of your business.”
 “I can’t figure it that way, or——”
Merriwell bit his words short. Ballard was just hurrying up over the
edge of the mesa and laying a course in his direction. Merry’s first
thought was that something had happened to Darrel, and he
hastened to get close to Ballard.
“Game begun?” panted Ballard.
“Begun, and half over,” was the reply. “We’re only to play two
quarters, and there’s a fifteen-minute interval between them. What’s
the matter, Pink? Why are you here? Darrel all right?”
“Darrel’s getting along in good shape,” Ballard answered, “but
there’s something up that ought to be attended to.”
“What?”
“It seems there’s a division of sentiment in the Gold Hill camp
regarding Darrel. A few of the Gold Hill fellows think Darrel isn’t
getting a fair shake. Lenning found it out, and made them stay
behind when he and the rest came to Tinaja Wells for this game.
He’d had a quarrel with Bleeker, I don’t know what about, and the
two have hardly spoken since last night. Hotchkiss, one of Darrel’s
Gold Hill friends, came to Dolliver’s a while ago and said Bleeker had
given Parkman a letter to be delivered to Lenning, and that the letter
contains evidence that will clear Darrel of that forgery charge.”
Merriwell jumped. Bradlaugh, too, was wildly excited.
“Jupiter!” muttered Brad, “I reckon we’re getting this down pretty
fine.”
“How do you know the letter contains evidence of that sort?”
asked Merriwell.
“Hotchkiss said so.”
“Well, how does Hotchkiss know?”
 “He and one or two more of Darrel’s friends at Camp Hawtrey got
their heads together and figured it out. Hotchkiss rode over to
Dolliver’s to tell Darrel that some of his friends must get the letter
away from Parkman.”
“Parkman has already delivered it,” put in Brad.
“Then, Hotchkiss said, it’s got to be taken away from Lenning.”
Merriwell’s dark eyes flashed. He believed fully in Darrel, and he
had no confidence whatever in Lenning. In his own mind, Merry was
convinced that Lenning had fabricated, and carried into effect, that
dastardly plot to make it appear as though Darrel had looted the
colonel’s safe of the one thousand dollars.
Was it possible that here, during this brief try-out with Gold Hill,
evidence could be deduced proving Darrel innocent of that forgery
charge?
Ballard, in his excitement, had not stated the case exactly as it
was. Hotchkiss had qualified his assertions somewhat in saying that
the communication from Bleeker to Lenning contained forgery
evidence. Ballard had merely left out the qualifying words of the
friend of Darrel from Camp Hawtrey.
This, at first blush, might seem like a trifling omission, and yet had
Merriwell not believed absolutely that Hotchkiss knew what he was
talking about, and that the note really contained evidence in the
forgery matter, his action would have been vastly different from
what it was.
It would soon be time to put the ball into play again. Merriwell, his
eyes roving over the field and the scattered players, was thinking
deeply.
“You think, Brad,” he asked, “that Lenning still has that note where
you say he placed it?”
“It’s a cinch!” Brad declared.
 “Keep this under your hats, both of you,” said Merriwell. “If that
evidence concerns Darrel, and indirectly myself, we’re going to have
it.”
He spun around and ran back to the field. Lenning was right guard
for the Gold Hill team, and Spencer Dunn was left guard for Ophir.
“Spence,” said Merry, “I want some of your harness. If you’ve no
objection, I’d like to take your place in the game for the second
quarter.”
“Go to it, Chip!” answered Dunn cheerfully, and began shedding as
much of his costume as Merriwell thought necessary and had time to
take.
Colonel Hawtrey witnessed the proceeding.
“Couldn’t stand the strain, eh, Merriwell?” he laughed. “Well, I
don’t blame you, my boy. Now I expect to see some real football.”
Merriwell smiled a little. “I wonder what Hawtrey would say,” he
muttered to himself, “if he knew just what sort of a game within a
game this was going to be?”
 CHAPTER XXIII.
GETTING THE EVIDENCE.

Merriwell was not disposed to be at all considerate of Jode

Lenning. Into Merry’s mind, again, came those ugly suspicions of the
favorite nephew.
It was conceivable that Lenning, jealous of his half brother, had
plotted to have him cast off and set adrift, just as he had, Merriwell
felt sure, engineered that robbery plot against him. What had
caused the accident on the cliff still remained a mystery; yet, terrible
as that accident had been, if the result of a plot, then the plot was
less heinous than the one by which it had been made to appear that
Ellis Darrel was a forger. Through the first, life might have been lost;
but, through the second, honor, which men of integrity hold dearer
than life, hung in the balance.
The blood ran hot through Merriwell’s veins as all these thoughts
trooped through his mind. Here was a chance to do something for
Darrel, was the idea that filled him, to the exclusion of anything and
everything else.
Taking his place on the field, opposite Lenning, Merriwell strove to
note the exact place where the note from Bleeker had been stowed.
His eyes, peering hawklike from either side of the rubber nose
guard, sought the lacings of the other guard’s jacket. Between two
of the crossed thongs he believed he caught a flash, the merest
flash, of something white. Then, while Merriwell’s brain was still
lashed with those ugly suspicions of Lenning, the playing began.
Ophir ran the kick-off back a bare seven yards. Line plunges,
during which Merry sought in vain for a chance at that scrap of
white, netted another gain of four yards. Then, as in some weird
dream, Merriwell found himself crouching in the middle of the line,
staring into the face of Lenning, with its shifty eyes and its
overtopping mop of black hair. The swaying lines locked and clashed
as the ball flew out of the scramble and into the arms of the Gold
Hill half back.
Merry plunged forward in an attempt to break through. Lenning
threw out a leg to trip him. Merry’s hands pawed at the jacket as he
went down, but he was up again in a flash with something clutched
in his fist.
“You’re not so much!” snarled Lenning.
Merriwell laughed. He could afford to. The evidence was in his
possession now.
The playing went on, and gradually Merriwell began to take more
interest in the battle and less in the scrap of evidence which had
come into his hands.
Ophir had the ball and was going down the field with it, five yards
through tackle, five more stolen through the guard, and then five
more around the end. A tackle run netted ten yards, and a forward
pass twenty, Brad grabbing the ball on a perfect throw.
Gold Hill’s confidence was oozing away steadily. Her men were
rattled, and Clancy and Dunn and Ballard were doing their utmost
from the side lines to make their confusion more complete. Before
Ophir’s attack, the Gold Hill line slumped and gave way.
And then, when close to Gold Hill’s goal, Mayburn lost the ball on
a distressing fumble. That nearly broke the center’s heart. Hawtrey
hung over the scramble as the players disentangled themselves, and
it was discovered that a Gold Hill man had the ball.
“Somebody kick me!” wailed Mayburn. “Oh, what a bobble!”
Gold Hill had no use for a scrimmage at that stage of the game,
and immediately lifted the pigskin into safer quarters. Both sides
were still without a score when, a few minutes later, the quarter
ended.
Merriwell had smothered his desire to do his best. Ophir, he knew,
had outplayed Gold Hill, and it was better for all concerned that
there should be no scoring. On the face of it, the teams might be
called evenly matched. As for the rest of it, the game Merriwell had
played within the game had been entirely successful.
The best of good feeling prevailed. It was much easier for the
right spirit to manifest itself over a scoreless game than if one side
or the other had made a touchdown or had kicked a goal.
Led by the colonel, the Gold Hill fellows collected in a group and
cheered the Ophir team, while Ophir, with Handy and Merriwell
leading, returned the compliment for their opponents.
“This,” beamed the colonel, taking Merriwell and Handy off to one
side, “starts our series of friendly competitions, and leaves nothing
to be desired. I have enjoyed myself this afternoon, and it has been
a pleasure to me to notice the utter absence of anything like ill
feeling. Keep up the good work, boys. I’ll have to leave you now, for
I want to get on my horse and ride over to the other camp. Jode
and his teammates will make the trip ’cross country.”
Merriwell and Handy walked with the colonel to the camp. As he
was about to mount his horse for the ride to Camp Hawtrey, the
colonel turned and gave Merry his hand.
“I wish that some day you might come to town with Jode and
have dinner with me,” said he. “I should esteem it a great pleasure,
Merriwell.”
“Thank you, colonel,” Frank answered, “but I’m afraid I shall be
too busy here to accept many social invitations.”
“You won’t forget to take the Ophir boys over to the other camp?”
“They can look for us over there almost any day.”
 “Good!”
He swung into his saddle, waved his hand, and started at a gallop
down the gulch.
“We could have scored,” mourned Handy, “we ought to have
scored. Mayburn——”
“I’m glad he fumbled,” interrupted Frank. “As I told the boys
before they went on the field, I wasn’t eager to have them win, but I
was more than eager to have them keep Gold Hill from winning. We
outplayed them, and that’s enough.”
“You got into it yourself in order to study the other team at close
quarters?”
“That wasn’t my idea exactly,” Frank answered, “although the
experience will probably be a help. Come on,” he added, suddenly
shifting the subject, “and let’s take our plunge in the pool.”
Ballard and Bradlaugh were feverishly eager to have a few words
in private with Merriwell. The opportunity did not offer until some
time after Merriwell had had his swim and had got into his clothes;
then, as he walked toward the camp, Ballard and Bradlaugh and
Clancy joined him. Already Ballard had confided to Clancy,
Merriwell’s real reason for getting actively into the football game.
“Did you win out, Chip?” asked Bradlaugh.
Merriwell nodded, and slapped his pocket.
“What’s the evidence?” queried Ballard. “Does it clear Darrel?”
“Haven’t looked at it yet,” was the reply.
Astonished exclamations came from the other three.
“Don’t mean to say you haven’t had time?” Clancy asked.
 “I’ve had the time, Clan, but not the inclination. We’ll let Darrel
look at the note first. Maybe,” and Merry grew thoughtful, “I jumped
into this thing too quick. Suppose Hotchkiss was wrong? Suppose
there’s no evidence in the note about the forgery? If that’s the case,
I’ve done a measly trick.”
“You were justified in getting that note, Chip,” declared Ballard,
“just on the strength of what I told you.”
“I hope so,” said Frank, “but that’s a thing we’ll leave to Darrel.
Shall we ride down the cañon this afternoon?”
“I’ve got to go back,” returned Ballard, “and you fellows might as
well go with me.”
Without delay, they started to get their horses ready. Half an hour
later they were speeding along the narrow cañon trail in single file,
Merriwell hardly knowing whether he ought to feel elated or
depressed over his exploit on the football field.
The high ideas of honor, inculcated by his father, would not have
pardoned his afternoon’s work unless it set right the great wrong
that had been done Ellis Darrel. Merriwell felt that, in his eagerness
to help his new chum, he might have committed a deed which he
would later regret. He had acted on the impulse of the moment, and
with implicit faith in what Ballard had repeated as coming from
Hotchkiss.
A fine point of ethics was involved, and Merriwell believed that no
eyes save Darrel’s should read the note unless it was really found to
have an important bearing on Darrel’s affairs.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
CONCERNING THE EVIDENCE.

When the four lads reached Dolliver’s, they found Darrel anxiously
awaiting news from Tinaja Wells.
“Did you get that letter, pards?” were his first words, as the four
from the camp trooped into the house.
“Yes,” said Frank. “Parkman had delivered the letter to Lenning,
and Lenning was in a temper when he read it. He seemed on the
point of tearing the note in pieces, then changed his mind and
pushed it into the front of his jacket. Brad saw him.”
“How did you get it from Lenning?”
“During the football game. I got into the play and secured the
note in a scrimmage.”
“Merriwell,” said Darrel, with deep feeling, “you’re a loyal friend, if
a fellow ever had one.”
“It’s something I wouldn’t have done unless it seemed best,”
answered Merriwell, “and I wouldn’t have done it, Darrel, if I had
thought there was the slightest doubt that it’s not what Hotchkiss
said.”
“Hasn’t it anything to do with me, or—or that trouble with the
colonel?”
“I don’t know what the letter contains. I have brought it to you,
Darrel, and you can read it. If it hasn’t any bearing on you, I’m
going to take it back to Lenning and tell him how I got it.”
 Clancy and Ballard were about to cry out against such a
proceeding, but there was a look in their chum’s face which assured
them that he had made up his mind as to the course he should
follow, and would keep to it if the circumstances warranted.
“Let’s see the letter, Chip,” said Darrel huskily.
Merriwell removed the soiled and crumpled paper from his pocket
and silently handed it to Darrel. The latter’s hand trembled as he
took the folded scrap and slowly opened it. His eyes widened as he
read the note’s contents; and then, when he had finished, his hand
dropped nervelessly at his side and he stared at Merriwell with wide
eyes.
“What is it?” asked Merry. “Has it anything to do with you?”
“Yes,” was the muffled response, “and with you, too. Read it. I
think you have a perfect right to do so, Chip.”
Merry took the note and read as follows:

“Lenning: I know about your cutting the rope and dropping

Darrel down the cliff. There are some things I won’t stand for,
and that’s one of them. If you try any dirty work during the
football game, I’ll blow the whole measly business to Merriwell.
Bleeker.”

Merriwell gasped. There was no further doubt about that

supposed accident on the cliff. It was no accident at all, but the
result of a fiendish design. It seemed hardly possible that Lenning, if
in his right senses, could have attempted such a villainous deed.
Without a word, Frank handed the note to Clancy, and it went
from one to the other until all had read it. No one spoke. The
crumpled paper came back to Darrel again, and he held it
thoughtfully in his trembling fingers.
 Distant voices were heard outside the house. Through a window
beside his bed Darrel could look into the mouth of the cañon.
Two horsemen had ridden out of the ragged entrance of the gulch
and had halted, their mounts pulled close together. One of the riders
was Colonel Hawtrey and the other was Lenning.
The colonel, it was evident, was on his way back to Gold Hill after
visiting the camp of the Gold Hill Athletic Club. Lenning, it was
equally evident, had ridden part way with him, and was now about
to face the other way and return to the camp.
Through the window, all the boys in the ranch house looked at the
horsemen. The colonel was smiling and happy. On his face could be
seen a look of affection for the lad at his side. Taking Jode’s hand,
he pressed it warmly, then used his spurs and rode off along the trail
toward home.
Jode watched him for a few moments, shouted a last farewell,
waved his hat, and then vanished at a gallop between the rugged
cañon walls. A mist arose in the eyes of Ellis Darrel. He began
tearing the paper to pieces, using his teeth and the one hand which
was still serviceable.
“What are you doing that for, Darrel?” demanded Ballard.
“It would kill my uncle if he thought both his nephews were
scoundrels,” Darrel answered. “I can’t have a hand in blackening
Jode’s character like this. I’ve put up with a whole lot, and I can put
up with a good deal more than I have, but this fight of mine is to
prove that I didn’t sign the colonel’s name to a check. See what I
mean? I—I can’t kill the colonel’s faith in Jode—not in this way. Don’t
say a word about this, any of you. Promise me that you won’t.”
There was something fine and noble about Darrel’s act in
destroying the evidence against Jode. It was not the evidence that
Darrel wanted. The temptation to ruin his half brother was not so
strong as his love for the misguided old colonel, or his desire to
prove his own innocence.
Merriwell stepped to the bed and clasped Darrel’s hand.
“That’s right, old man,” said he, “exactly right. Say, Darrel,” and
his voice quivered, “you’re a brick!”
 CHAPTER XXV.
THE UNDER DOG.

“Great Scott, Chip! Say, I didn’t think there was a place like that in
Arizona.”
Young Merriwell and his red-headed chum, Owen Clancy, stood on
the crest of the long, sloping wall of a gulch and looked downward
at a scene that filled them with wonder and admiration.
The gulch was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet deep, and a
quarter of a mile from rim to rim. On either side the slopes fell away
in a gentle descent, sparsely covered with pine trees, and with here
and there a patch of flaming poppies touching the brown of the
hillsides as with fire.
In the depths was a long, silvery vista of water, placid, and cool,
and deep. At the foot of the slope on whose crest the two lads were
standing, was a wide strip of clean yellow sand. Here there were half
a dozen white canvas tents, pitched close to the water, with camping
equipment scattered in all directions.
Four or five canoes were drawn up on the beach. On a float, a few
yards from shore, several lads in “Nature’s raiment” were sitting and
splashing their feet in the water; others were diving from the float,
their white bodies flashing outward and downward like so many
darts, disappearing under the smooth surface of the river and
leaving a jet of spray and a quiver of silvery ripples; and still others
were swimming, far up and down the stream. All were enjoying
themselves to the utmost, if their laughter, echoing and
reverberating between the slopes could be taken as an indication.
 “This is certainly a peach of a place for a camp,” said young
Merriwell. “In some ways it has our own camp at Tinaja Wells
beaten a mile. The sight of those canoes down there makes me
hungry for a paddle!”
“And to think,” went on Clancy, “that this is nearly the middle of
November, and that back home the snow is beginning to fly, and
overcoats are trumps, and folks are hunting up their galoshes! Wow!
It hardly seems possible. Down here in southern Arizona a fellow can
have his out-door sports all the year ’round. So that’s Camp Hawtrey,
eh? Well, it’s a bully place, if you ask me.”
“The only thing these Gold Hill fellows haven’t got is a good
athletic field. I hear they’ve cleaned up a patch of desert back of the
gulch, and are using that for sports and practice. But that slice of
raw ground isn’t in it with our mesa, Clan.”
“You’re right there, Chip. Our camp at Tinaja Wells has certainly
got it over this one so far as a field is concerned, but I wish we had
a nice stretch of river like that for canoeing. Where’s Lenning? Can
you see him down there in that bunch of swimmers?”
The boys above studied carefully the ones below, but failed to
discover Lenning.
“He’s not there, Clan,” said Merriwell, “and I can’t see Bleeker,
Hotchkiss, and several more of the Gold Hill Athletic Club whom we
know tolerably well.”
“Jode Lenning, I guess, is the main squeeze of that outfit, and
he’s the one we’ll have to talk with.”
“I hate to have anything to do with him,” muttered Merry, “but
he’s Colonel Hawtrey’s nephew, and the colonel is the backbone of
the Gold Hill club, and if our fellows and the Gold Hillers have any
more friendly competitions, we’ll have to arrange with Lenning.”
“Lenning’s a skunk,” growled Clancy. “If it hadn’t been for him we
know mighty well that Ellis Darrel, his own half brother, wouldn’t be
laid up at Dolliver’s with a broken arm. We know, I say, that Lenning
cut the rope that dropped Darrel over the cliff, and——”
“Cut it, Clan!” interrupted Merriwell. “We promised Darrel we’d
keep that to ourselves.”
“Well, I’m not blowing it around, am I? The way Hawtrey snuggles
up to Lenning and hands Darrel, his other nephew, all the hard
knocks makes me pretty darn tired.”
“Hawtrey will be all right when he finds out that Darrel didn’t forge
his name to that check more than a year ago.”
“Yes, when he finds it out—and that’s never. Lenning, I’ll bet a
peck of dollars, was at the bottom of that forgery, and you can’t
bring forward any proof against Lenning that the colonel will
consider. You know that as well as I do, Chip.”
“Something will turn up, Clan,” asserted Merriwell confidently.
“When a fellow gets in wrong it’s bound to come out unless he
changes his ways. And Jode Lenning isn’t changing—that is, not so
you can notice it. Luck is going to turn Darrel’s way—I’ve got a
pretty good hunch to that effect. The old colonel will find out for
himself just which of his nephews is the more reliable. Wait, that’s
all.”
“I can’t see anything rosy in Darrel’s future,” growled Clancy, “so
long as Jode has his big stand-in with his Uncle Alvah. But there’s no
use chinning about that now. We’re over here from our camp as a
games committee to fix up a schedule of sports with Gold Hill, and
we’re supposed to be loaded to the gunnels with peaceable
sentiments and loving regards for Ophir’s athletic rivals. Oh, slush!
I’m in such an amiable mood, right this minute, that I’d like to take a
crack at Lenning with my bare knuckles.”
“Lenning’s only one of that Gold Hill crowd, old man,” said Chip
soothingly. “Bradlaugh, president of the Ophir club, and Hawtrey,
who backs the Gold Hillers, are both tired of having the rival
organizations at loggerheads. They want peace and friendship
between the two camps, and I don’t blame them. We’re going to do
what we can to make the rivalry more sportsmanlike, and less bitter.
‘Fair play and no favor,’ that’s our motto. When we find Lenning,
Clan, just hold yourself in and don’t bite.”
“All right,” assented Clancy, although with a show of some
reluctance. “Let’s go down there, find Lenning, and get the business
over with.”
Before they could start down the long slope that led to the bottom
of the gulch, both lads were suddenly startled by the sudden note of
a firearm. The report came from a considerable distance, evidently,
yet was perfectly clear and distinct.
“What’s that?” demanded Clancy, wheeling about and staring at
his chum.
“Sounded like a revolver,” was the reply. “Somebody trying a hand
at target practice, more than likely.”
“The sound didn’t come from below—the shooting is going on up
here, somewhere. Maybe Lenning is mixed up in it.”
“We’ll mosey around and find out,” said Merry.
Another report was heard, and the two chums, laying their course
by the sound, started along the top of the gulch wall. A third shot
was followed by a sharp yelp, as of some animal in pain.
“Was that a dog, Chip?” queried Clancy.
“Strikes me it was,” said Merry. “This way,” he added, turning from
the gulch and moving off into some low, rocky hills.
As they advanced, the boys heard voices and laughter. One of the
voices they recognized as Jode Lenning’s. Presently, from behind a
bit of a ridge, they looked out and discovered what was going on.
 Lenning and three more of the Gold Hill crowd—fellows of about
his same stamp—had tied a dog to an ironwood tree. At a distance
of about fifty feet they were taking turns shooting at the poor brute
—evidently seeing how close they could come without making a hit.
The dog was about as homely an animal as Merry had ever seen.
His tawny hide was scarred in a dozen different places, and one eye
was gone and a front leg was crooked—apparently the leg had been
broken and Nature had healed it alone. There was some object tied
to the dog’s tail by a section of stout twine—the lads behind the
ridge could not make out exactly what the object was.
Bang! went the revolver. A flurry of dust was kicked up under the
wretched brute, which almost turned a somersault at the end of the
rope. Lenning and his companions laughed at the dog’s antics.
Clancy’s face went black as a thundercloud. His fists clenched and,
with a muttered imprecation, he started to hurl himself around the
end of the ridge. Chip caught him and held him back.
“Are you going to stand for this, Chip?” asked the red-headed
fellow in a savage whisper.
“No,” said Merriwell; “we’ll interfere at the right time. Wait a
minute.”
Clancy restrained himself and once more sank down behind the
rocks. Parkman, one of Lenning’s companions, had begun to speak.
“I reckon we’d better stop shooting, Jode,” said he, “or the dog
will hit the cap on the stones and set off the dynamite.”
“You’re right, Park,” answered Lenning. “We’ll pass up the
shooting, touch off the fuse, and set the ki-yi adrift. When the
cartridge goes off,” he chuckled, “I bet there won’t be enough of
that tramp dog left to wad a gun. Lamson, you light the fuse. You
can cut the rope, Park, when the fuse is going. Be quick about it or
the whelp will take a piece out of you.”
 Clancy’s eyes were fairly burning as he leaned toward Merry and
gripped his arm.
“Do you know what those skunks are up to, Chip?” he whispered.
“They’ve tied a dynamite cartridge to that brute’s tail, and they’re
going to light the fuse and turn the dog loose!”
“No, they’re not,” said Merriwell decisively. “That’s what they’re
aiming to do, Clan, but we’ll interfere with the game. They’re a fine
crowd of cannibals, I must say,” he went on scathingly. “The colonel
ought to be here and see that precious nephew of his in his real
colors. Hang it, Clan, I’m so worked up I can’t see straight.”
Clancy gave vent to a gruesome laugh.
“Here we come from Tinaja Wells with an olive branch,” he
chuckled, “and now we’re going out to lam Jode over the head with
it. Come on. Lamson is getting ready to scratch a match and light
the fuse.”
“Here we go,” answered Merriwell.
With a rush the two boys got out from behind the ridge. They
were nearer the cowering dog than they were to Lenning, and, the
first thing Lamson knew, Merriwell had tipped him over and knocked
the blazing match from his fingers. Clancy, at the same time, had
grabbed Parkman by the collar and pulled him back so quickly that
the open jackknife fell out of his nerveless hand.
Jode Lenning, stunned into momentary inaction by the unexpected
appearance of Merriwell and Clancy, suddenly recovered himself,
gave an angry yell, and started toward the newcomers at a run.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
BAD BLOOD.

As the only heir of a very rich and influential man, Jode Lenning
had a number of followers of a certain sort. Parkham, Lamson, and
“Klink” Hummer, who were bearing a part with Jode in his doubtful
“sport” with the tramp dog, were three of these satellites; and they
revolved around Jode and made his will their law, just for the favors
which he could dole out to them. There was a community of interest
among the four lads, but no real friendship.
As Lenning rushed toward Merriwell and Clancy, Hummer raced
along at his heels. Finally the two halted close to the pair from the
other camp. Lamson and Parkman, scowling over the rough
treatment they had received, had regained their feet and stepped
shoulder to shoulder with Lenning.
“What are you two butting in here for?” shouted Lenning, his
shifty eyes a-gleam with anger.
“We think you’ve tortured that dog enough, Lenning,” replied
Merriwell, smothering his own wrath and trying to use a persuasive
tone. “You’d better cut away that dynamite cartridge and let the
brute go.”
Here was a suggestion that thinly veiled a command. Although
Merriwell’s voice was like velvet, yet it cut like steel, and Lenning’s
temper boiled more briskly than ever.
“You’re a private little society for the prevention of cruelty to
coyote dogs, eh?” Lenning sneered. “That cur has been snooping
around our camp for days, stealing our grub. We’re going to put him
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