INTRODUCTORY TO “THE SCARLET LETTER”

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 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 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

thunderbolts 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 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—a 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, in

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 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 the edifice. And here, some six

months ago—pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged

stool, 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 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 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 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 last 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 unaccustomed 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 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 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 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 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, today’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 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 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 reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy

and sensual: a tenderloin 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 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

the 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 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 I speak.

But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which

should go deeply into his consciousness—roused by a trumpet’s peal,

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 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

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 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.

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 nor 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 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—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

town’s 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 Jonathan Pue, 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. Pue’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, I 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 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, 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 met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his

port was the dignity of one who 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 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—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 up. 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-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

today, 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 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 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.

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 form a complete estimate of the advantages

of official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming 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. If, heretofore, I 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 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 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 by, I 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—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.