With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial gown from before his breast.  It was revealed!  For an instant the multitude gazed with horror on the ghastly miracle, while the minister stood with a flush of triumph in his face.  Then, down he sank upon the scaffold.  Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her bosom.  Old Roger Chillingworth knelt beside him.

“Thou hast escaped me!” he repeated more than once.

“May God forgive thee!” said the minister.  “Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!”

He fixed his dying eyes on the woman and the child.

“My little Pearl,” he said feebly, “thou wilt kiss me.  Hester, farewell.  God knows, and He is merciful!  His will be done!  Farewell.”

That final word came forth with the minister’s expiring breath.  The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder.

* * * * *

After many days there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.  Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a scarlet letter imprinted in the flesh.  Others denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s.  According to these highly respectable witnesses the minister’s confession implied no part of the guilt of Hester Prynne, but was to teach us that we were all sinners alike.  Old Roger Chillingworth died and bequeathed his property to little Pearl.

For years the mother and child lived in England, and then Pearl married, and Hester returned alone to the little cottage by the forest.

* * * * *

The House of the Seven Gables

“The House of the Seven Gables,” published in 1851, was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne directly after “The Scarlet Letter,” and though not equal to that remarkable book, was full worthy of its author’s reputation, and brought no disappointment to those who looked for great things from his pen.  It seemed to James Russell Lowell “the highest art” to typify, “in the revived likeness of Judge Pyncheon to his ancestor the colonel, that intimate relationship between the present and the past in the way of ancestry and descent, which historians so carefully overlook.”  Here, as in “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne is unsparing in his analysis of the meaning of early American Puritanism—­its intolerance and its strength.

I.—­The Old Pyncheon Family

Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely-peaked gables, and a huge clustered chimney in the midst.  The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm tree before the door is known as the Pyncheon elm.