“I am not aweary, mother,” replied the little girl.  “But you may sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile.”

“A story, child!” said Hester.  “And about what?”

“Oh, a story about the Black Man,” answered Pearl, taking hold of her mother’s gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into her face.

“How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big, heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their names with their own blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms.  Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?”

“And who told you this story, Pearl,” asked her mother, recognising a common superstition of the period.

“It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where you watched last night,” said the child.  “But she fancied me asleep while she was talking of it.  She said that a thousand and a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on them.  And that ugly tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one.  And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man’s mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood.  Is it true, mother?  And dost thou go to meet him in the nighttime?”

“Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?” asked Hester.  “Not that I remember,” said the child.  “If thou fearest to leave me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee.  I would very gladly go!  But, mother, tell me now!  Is there such a Black Man?  And didst thou ever meet him?  And is this his mark?”

“Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?” asked her mother.

“Yes, if thou tellest me all,” answered Pearl.

“Once in my life I met the Black Man!” said her mother.  “This scarlet letter is his mark!”

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the forest track.  Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere.  It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.  The trees impending over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand.  Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon