Chapter 1

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
THE SCARLET LETTER
I. THE PRISON DOOR
II. THE MARKET-PLACE
III. THE RECOGNITION
IV. THE INTERVIEW
V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
VI. PEARL
VII. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL
VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
IX. THE LEECH
X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
XII. THE MINISTER’S VIGIL
XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
XV. HESTER AND PEARL
XVI. A FOREST WALK
XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
XXII. THE PROCESSION
XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
XXIV. CONCLUSION

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

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.