The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale’s feelings as he returned from his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace.  The pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward journey.  But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable activity that astonished him.  He could not but recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled over the same ground, only two days before.  As he drew near the town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves.  It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them.  There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one.  Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change.  The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town.  They looked neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister’s deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability.  A similar impression struck him most remarkably as he passed under the walls of his own church.  The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale’s mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years.  The minister’s own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation.  It was the same town as heretofore, but the same minister returned not from the forest.  He might have said to the friends who greeted him—­“I am not the man for whom you take me!  I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy brook!  Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!” His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him—­“Thou art thyself the man!” but the error would have been their own, not his.