1 Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.
2 Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 3 It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 4 It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 5 It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
6 It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 7 On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 8 The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 9 Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 10 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.
11 It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 12 The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 13 It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 14 A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
15 The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
16 Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison.
17 In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful.
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