The Scarlet Letter: A Romance -Section 04 - The Prison-Door

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dream Ario Books presents section four of The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chapter one the prison door. A throng
of bearded men in sad colored garments and gray steeple
crowned hats, intermixed with women, somewharing hoods, and others bare headed,

(00:20):
was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door
of which was heavily timbered with oak and studded with
iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia
of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have
invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot
a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery and

(00:43):
another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance
with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the
forefathers of Boston had built the first prison house somewhere
in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they
marked out the first burial ground on Isaac Johnson's lanfe
and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus

(01:04):
of all the congregated sepulchers in the old churchyard of
King's Chapel. Certain it is that some fifteen or twenty
years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail
was already marked with weather stains and other indications of age,
which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle browed
and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron work

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of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else
in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime,
it seemed never to have known a youthful era before
this ugly edifice. And between it and the wheel track
of the street was a grass plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed,

(01:49):
apple peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something
congenial in the soil that had so early borne the
black flower of civilized society risen. But on one side
of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was
a wild rose bush, covered in this month of June

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with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer
their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he
went in, and to the condemned criminals he came forth
to his doom, in token that the deep heart of
nature could pity and be kind to him. This rose bush,
by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history.

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But whether it had merely survived out of the stern
old wilderness so long after the fall of the gigantic
pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as
there is fair authority for believing it had sprung up
under the footsteps of the sainted Anne Hutchison as she
entered the prison door, we shall not take upon us

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to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of
our narrative, which is now about to issue from that
inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one
of its flowers and present it to the reader. It
may serve let us hope to symbolize some sweet moral
blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve

(03:15):
the darkening clothes of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
End of Section four. Dream Audio Books. Hopes you have
enjoyed this program.