The Scarlet Letter

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Edited by Joseph Pearce

Contributors to this volume:
Jennifer Bonsell
Richard Harp
Regis Martin
Mary R. Reichardt
Aaron Urbanczyk

A key figure in the development of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne was also profoundly influenced by his ancestors and the Christianity that underscored their Puritan heritage. A literary classic, The Scarlet Letter presents a profound meditation on the nature of sin, repentance, and redemption, and on how such Christian concepts may be integrated into American democracy. This edition features an introduction by Aaron Urbanczyk, chair of the literature department at Southern Catholic College, that explores themes in ""The Custom-House"" that guide the reader's interpretation of the text of the novel, and several critical articles on the work's major symbols and Christian themes. Mary R. Reichardt, the editor of this edition, is a professor of literature in the Catholic Studies department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul MN.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781681495491

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864) was an acclaimed American novelist. He was born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, though he added a w to his name to distance himself from his family's involvement in the infamous Salem witch trials of the 1690s. The trials, along with Puritan culture in general, greatly influenced his writings. He is best remembered for his hallmark novels The House of Seven Gables, and The Scarlet Letter.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Aaron Urbanczyk

Southern Catholic College

The Scarlet Letter is one of American literature’s greatest tragedies. In chapter 1, Nathaniel Hawthorne refers to his work as a tale of human frailty and sorrow,¹ and like all great tragedy, the work speaks of human failings and limitations. Shortly before The Scarlet Letter’s publication in 1850, Herman Melville (who became closely acquainted with Hawthorne) described Hawthorne’s fiction as shrouded in blackness, ten times black,² and Hawthorne’s friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once referred to the old, dull pain pervading Hawthorne’s writings.³ In an 1850 letter to his friend Horatio Bridge, Hawthorne mentioned that The Scarlet Letter lacks sunshine and that it is a positively h-ll fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.⁴

The Scarlet Letter mines New England’s history to create a uniquely American tragic idiom, and it is also a novel born of Hawthorne’s complex reaction to his own Puritan heritage. The Scarlet Letter is as personal a work of fiction as Hawthorne ever wrote. His sense of himself, his past, and his understanding of literature pervade the novel. Indeed, history in The Scarlet Letter plays a heavy, perhaps even oppressive, role. Thus it is important to understand Hawthorne’s life, the circumstances under which he wrote the story, and his Puritan ancestry to properly appreciate the tragic brilliance of his greatest literary achievement.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, and he died in his sleep on the evening of May 18 (or the early hours of May 19), 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He descended from a long line of New England Puritans and sea captains on his father’s side and industrious Yankee businessmen on his mother’s side. His father, Captain Nathaniel Hathorne, was involved in the Oriental sea trade that made Salem wealthy during the late eighteenth century. As a young boy, Nathaniel read his father’s sea journals. This connection to his father was important to him because Captain Hathorne died at sea in 1808, before Nathaniel’s fourth birthday. Nathaniel thus grew up closer to his mother’s family, the Mannings, mostly thrifty business folk who took the trouble to educate him. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1825 (where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president of the United States Franklin Pierce were his classmates) and, like all college graduates, felt pressured to choose an occupation. Absent a father and feeling the expectations of his Manning relatives, Hawthorne selected an unlikely profession: he became an author of fiction.

Hawthorne returned to Salem and embarked upon a period of secluded literary apprenticeship and productivity lasting from 1825 to 1837. Prior to 1836, Hawthorne devoted himself almost exclusively to writing. During this time, he published a novel and numerous short stories, with only limited commercial and literary success. In these years, Hawthorne also began seriously researching colonial Puritan history, his Hathorne ancestors particularly. Clearly he was less than enthusiastic over what he discovered of his grave Puritan forefathers. He added the w to his last name sometime around 1830, a move that may have been motivated, one might speculate, by a desire to distance himself from several of his infamous paternal ancestors.⁵ Between 1836 and 1846, he attempted to support himself by editing a magazine in Boston (January-August 1836); serving as measurer of coal and salt at the Boston Custom House (1839—1840); participating in George Ripley’s utopian scheme for communal living, Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts (April-November 1841); and continuing to write short stories, after his marriage to Sophia Peabody, in a cottage on the property of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family in Concord, Massachusetts, called the Old Manse (1842—1845). A faithful Democrat, he actively cultivated and retained the friendship of many New England Democrats though his interests were more literary than political. As a result of such solicitous friends, he was appointed chief officer of the Salem Custom House, a position he occupied from April 1846 until June 1849. Realizing that fiction writing was not the most stable occupation for a family man, Hawthorne gladly accepted a government job with a steady income. But in the nineteenth century as today, any job associated with political partisanship is uncertain, and he was unceremoniously fired from the Salem Custom House in 1849. A member of the opposing political party, the Whig Zachary Taylor, won the 1848 presidential election, setting in motion a movement to excise members of the losing political party, the Democrats, from federal offices in New England. As Hawthorne poetically ruminates in The Custom-House, his introductory section to The Scarlet Letter, my own head was the first that fell in the political guillotines at work under the new Whig administration (see p. 43).

In many instances, it is not necessary to place a literary work in the context of the author’s life to appreciate its aesthetic merit. In the case of The Scarlet Letter, however, Hawthorne very personally introduces the novel through the lens of tragic events in his life, both the tragedy of losing his livelihood as a federal employee and the tragedy of being a descendant of his Hathorne ancestors. Upon being fired, he found himself once again a literary man reliant upon his pen for income, and he set to work furiously on the manuscript that became The Scarlet Letter. Initially, Hawthorne conceived of The Scarlet Letter as one story in a collection of tales (as noted in his mention in The Custom-House of other tales in the volume). His publisher James T. Fields, however, suggested Hawthorne present just Hester Prynne’s story with the introductory sketch, The Custom-House.

The Custom-House sketch not only is important regarding literary biography but also guides the reader in understanding The Scarlet Letter as a literary work of art. Several themes in this piece immediately urge themselves upon the reader. Ostensibly it provides a vivid image of the author’s workplace during his tenure at the Salem Custom House. Yet upon closer inspection, The Custom-House does much more than merely regale the reader with humorous details of the author’s co-workers. For one thing, it underscores Hawthorne’s fatalistic sense of place by meditating upon his attachment to Salem—or perhaps better said, upon Salem’s claim on him. In The Custom-House, the narrator views Salem as a place of tragedy, and this sense of place is mirrored in the novel proper. Because of the long connection of [his] family with one spot, Hawthorne states, I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home (see p. 12). This theme is echoed in Hester Prynne’s decision to remain in Boston after the sentence of the scarlet letter (signifying adultery) is imposed upon her. As the narrator of The Scarlet Letter tells us,

[I]t may seem marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home, where . . . she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around . . . the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime. (see p. 79)

Indeed, Salem had given the color to Hawthorne’s life in more ways than one. Not only was it the site of his seemingly fruitless literary labors prior to 1849 and the location of his public humiliation in the custom house debacle, but it also held other, older ghosts that haunted the author and tied him to the town as he wrote The Scarlet Letter.

Salem, in fact, became a metaphor in Hawthorne’s mind for Puritanism and its legacy in his family. New England Puritan history and culture, especially during the colonial era, are bound together in Hawthorne’s psyche with his hometown of Salem. It is easy to misunderstand Hawthorne’s intentions in creating fiction about the early Puritans. His views of the Puritans in general, and his own ancestors in particular, are necessarily complex and never one-sided. Hawthorne does not unequivocally reject Puritan culture as perverse or disordered any more than he blindly celebrates the Puritans’ many remarkable accomplishments. Neither does he pass judgment upon their religion. Their rigid Calvinism certainly made him shudder, but a theological critique of their doctrines is well beyond the scope of his fiction. Rather, Hawthorne’s objective in delving into his own and his region’s past is primarily aesthetic. He seeks to create a stage for genuine human tragedy, in this case a complex psychological study of the darker recesses of the human heart. As one of the greatest tragedians to write in the American idiom, Hawthorne exploits Puritan notions of predestination and God’s absolute providential control over human affairs, both tenets of Calvinist theology, in order to create the typical tragic environment in which the human person is limited by forces far beyond his control. The sense of impending doom in the novel’s concluding chapters, where it becomes clear that Hester and Dimmesdale cannot escape their sinful past or Chillingworth’s machinations, is particularly palpable because of its religious context. In the Calvinist theological economy, human actions are strictly predestined and determined; there is virtually no notion that God’s grace cooperates with human freedom or autonomy. Thus, if it is God’s providential plan to execute justice upon Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne through Chillingworth’s torments, theological logic dictates that the actors in the tragedy are impotent to change or modify this design in any way through their actions.

History also gives color to The Scarlet Letter’s character development, and once again The Custom-House guides the reader here. Nathaniel Hawthorne descended from two of Salem’s most prominent Puritans: William Hathorne, the first of the Hathornes to come to the New World from England (he arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and died in 1681), and John Hathorne, the fourth child of William Hathorne (died in 1717). Nathaniel’s view of William and John reflects his divided sentiments about the Puritans, but it also reveals a mind that constantly gravitated toward tragedy and the painful legacy of human sin and failure. In The Custom-House, Hawthorne refers to his ancestors’ legacy of Puritanical intolerance, rigidity, and violence. William Hathorne, his paternal great-great-great-grandfather, was known for his severity as a political figure regarding public scandals such as crime and adultery, and he had a particular contempt for heresy. He is infamous for his persecution of the Quakers, in particular one Ann Coleman, whom he ordered whipped in public (Hawthorne surely had this incident in mind in composing his short story The Gentle Boy). As Hawthorne states, William’s son [John] . . . inherited the persecuting spirit and is primarily remembered as a key figure in the Salem witch trials of 1692. As a magistrate, John Hathorne participated in the trials by gathering evidence against the alleged witches. Hawthorne directly refers to these two figures when he says, I. . . as their representative . . . take shame upon myself for their sakes. He also prays that any curse incurred by them . . . may be now and henceforth removed (see p. 10).

Hawthorne views human history through the lens of tragedy. In recalling his ancestors, whom he neither despises nor completely rejects, he feels the lingering weight of their sin and guilt in his own life, and he prays that the cycle of retribution for their crimes will end with him. From the point of view of literary tragedy, human guilt is cyclic, familial, and historical—human evil is seen as recurring, affecting multiple members of a family, and passed down through generations. History had taught Hawthorne the dark lesson that tragedy deals with people who have admirable traits but make grave moral errors that affect themselves, their families, and their community in profound and lasting ways. For Hawthorne, the Puritan community of colonial New England, whose complex heritage is his own by birthright, is the ideal tragic setting.

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne creates a parallel to his Puritan ancestors mentioned in The Custom-House. The characters of John Wilson and Governor Bellingham are, in a sense, indistinguishable in their traits and actions from his forefathers William and John: they are the same grave Puritan types one can both admire and feel contempt for. Wilson and Bellingham are severe in their punishment of Hester Prynne, and they uphold a social and political code that often crushes human freedom and offends human dignity. As evidence for this we see the list of punishments the local gossips propose for Hester Prynne in chapter 2. Yet Hawthorne locates in these characters the same blend of severity and humanity he found in his ancestors. Both Bellingham and Wilson are also capable of kindness, generosity, and empathy for Hester and her daughter, Pearl. Essentially, the language of shame Hawthorne uses in reference to William and John is that of psychological pain and not necessarily contempt or rejection. In his Custom-House description of William, Hawthorne states that his forefather possessed the typical Puritanic traits, both good and evil and that he was the author of many better deeds than persecuting Quakers (see p. 10). William and John Hathorne were men of great abilities and gifts yet were also prone to error, inhumanity, and fanaticism. In other words, they typify the best and worst of humanity, just like the Boston Puritans in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s evocation of the Puritans serves the needs of his art: it allows him to create believable tragedy in an American idiom highlighting the limitations and flaws of our universal human condition.

The Custom-House also gives the reader the key to understanding Hawthorne’s preferred genre, the romance. Modern readers understand a romance as a love story, but Hawthorne, who identified himself as an author of romances, uses the word to signify a literary form. The romance is first distinguished from the novel proper. In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne asserts that a novel aims at a very minute fidelity . . . to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.⁶ In other words, the novel attempts to be realistic. The romance, on the other hand, blends the actual and the fantastic into a hybrid of realism and pure fantasy, and it is often set in a remotely distant past. The romance is not the realism of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, for example, nor is it the fantasy of Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Rather, it involves something of both. In The Custom-House, Hawthorne uses moonlight as a metaphor for the peculiar literary optic of the romancer. Moonlight not only illuminates but imaginatively transforms its object in the viewer’s mind; one sees the everyday world eerily and surreally transformed by moonlight. Thus it is the natural ally and catalyst of the romancer’s imagination. Moonlight creates a type of 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 (see p. 37). As a romancer, Hawthorne uses his liberty to evoke the improbable and supernatural in The Scarlet Letter without crossing into pure fantasy.

The Custom-House itself models this subtle blending of reality and fantasy. While Hawthorne was actually employed in the Salem Custom House and lost his job in a political shakedown, and while there actually was a Salem surveyor named Jonathan Pue (who died in 1760), the discovery of the scarlet letter and Surveyor Pue’s manuscript described in The Custom-House is purely fictitious. Further, once the narrator begins telling Hester’s story, he incorporates all sorts of fantastic things into his tale, including witchcraft; the folklore of elves, demons, and the satanic legend of the Black Man; supernatural signs in the sky; and the mysterious powers of the scarlet letter itself. Yet in so doing, the narrator never abandons the historically concrete world of colonial Boston. Such hints of the supernatural and improbable are not there simply for the sake of imaginative titillation. Rather, they help the romancer magnify moral truths about the human condition. The historically based yet pseudo-fairy-tale landscape of The Scarlet Letter vividly highlights the moral tragedy of human sin, suffering, hidden guilt, the pain of isolation, and the danger of letting the intellect monopolize the heart. Also, the romancer’s lack of strict adherence to realism helps explain Hawthorne’s use of narrative ambiguity. In telling his tale, Hawthorne’s narrator suggests more than he asserts. Often the narrator leaves the reader with an imperfect perception of what is actually happening in the story. For instance, one wonders whether Mistress Hibbins really is a witch, whether there is some inexplicable magic in Pearl’s elfish moods, whether there is a Black Man in the woods, whether a great letter A does appear in the sky the night Hester and Pearl find Dimmesdale on the scaffold, and so on. Through narrative ambiguity, the actual and the fantastic continually overlap. This practice is perhaps most obvious in the concluding chapter of the novel, in which the narrator recounts four possible explanations of what actually happened and what people really saw when Dimmesdale ascended the scaffold to stand with Hester and Pearl.

Finally, The Custom-House gives us a clue to understanding and reading Hawthorne as symbolist. Few authors are more adept in the art of constructing complex symbols than Nathaniel Hawthorne. In literary criticism, a symbol is something that stands for more than itself, usually something that transcends the physical world and points to a metaphysical or psychological reality. Indeed, the force of Hawthorne’s fiction resides more in his use of symbolism than in character development (with the exception of Hester Prynne). Through the narrator’s discovery of the scarlet letter, The Custom-House overtly directs the reader to the power symbols possess to convey complex layers of meaning. The narrator is immediately curious about what the letter symbolizes: [I]t strangely interested me, he tells us. He concludes that "there was some deep meaning in [the scarlet letter], most worthy of interpretation . . . which . . . streamed forth from the mystic symbol" (see p. 33; italics mine). The narrator’s message here seems clear: Watch closely for symbols in the story to come, for their interpretation is necessary to understanding it. Some of the powerful symbols in the novel include the prison door from which Hester emerges in chapter 1; the roses seen outside the prison door and in Governor Bellingham’s garden; the scaffold, upon which three significant scenes play out; the woods and the stream; the name Pearl; and the various serpentine images in the text. A reader of The Scarlet Letter must be attuned to Hawthorne’s complex use of literary symbolism, and The Custom-House prepares us by presenting at the tale’s threshold the paramount symbol of the story for our consideration. We, like the narrator, are invited to feel the power of this symbol and wonder about its many layers of significance.

Even though they descend into the chaos of human evils, most great tragedies end on a note of resolution. After the tragic protagonist experiences calamitous ruin, order slowly returns back to the literary landscape. The Scarlet Letter is no exception, and The Custom-House once again anticipates the resolution of Hester’s tragedy. The narrator comes to terms with his past through telling the tale Jonathan Pue has left behind. In a sense, publicizing Hester’s tale is the narrator’s act of atonement regarding his family’s sins. He offers the reader the boon of a sweet moral blossom that he artfully distills from Hester Prynne’s tale of human frailty and sorrow because for him the evils of the past can become moral wisdom for the future. Thus he makes his peace with Salem and all it represents, and he bids it farewell on the threshold of his story: Soon. . . my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory. . . with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses. . . . Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else (see p. 45). In his narrative persona, Hawthorne thus ends his family tragedy on a note of resolution in the form of his impending departure. But here the doubling of the narrator and Hester takes a different turn. Liberated from his past and purged of the pain of its memories, the narrator is free to become, as he states, a citizen of somewhere else: he moves on. Hester, however, does not do so. Although she leaves Boston temporarily with Pearl (who becomes, the story indicates, happily married with a child of her own), the site of her tragedy eventually calls her back. But in returning to Boston, Hester’s story reaches resolution, for she comes back not in ignominy but as a celebrated social benefactor sought after for her wisdom in matters of the heart.

To the end, however, Hawthorne’s masterful use of symbolism reminds us that this story is one of dark tragedy. The romance concludes with two striking images of human guilt, imperfection, and limitation: the separated graves of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale and the mystical symbol of the scarlet letter. The Scarlet Letter has begun with the symbol’s discovery, and it ends with its image on Hester’s and Arthur’s gravestone, the boundary of life and death. As the narrator would have it, the scarlet letter reaches across time and culture, not just in his own memory but for whomever may read his tale. From beyond the grave, it reaches us and teaches the lesson of tragedy. When the narrator counsels us at the novel’s conclusion to Be true! he pleads with us to acknowledge the truth tragedy reveals about the human condition: we are imperfect and limited beings, and if we try to deny this fact or hide our flaws from others, we ruin ourselves. The lesson of The Scarlet Letter is thus one of the great imperatives of tragedy: Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred! (see p. 249).

The Text of

THE SCARLET LETTER

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE¹

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 favored 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.² And now—because, beyond my deserts,³ 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,⁴ 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 and 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,⁵ 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 recognized 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 prolix⁶ 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,⁷ 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 portico⁸ 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 truculency⁹ 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, vixenly¹⁰ 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 eider-down¹¹ 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 rankling¹² 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,¹³ 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 or 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,¹⁴ 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 weather—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 speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses,¹⁵ and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of custom,¹⁶ but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands—were CustomHouse 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;¹⁷ around the doors