In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted.  This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair.  There were several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors.  She had flourished during the period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century.  Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect.  It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart, by which means—­as a person of such propensities inevitably must—­she gained from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance.  Prying further into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled “The scarlet letter”; and it should be borne carefully in mind that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue.  The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself—­a most curious relic—­are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them.  I must not be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor’s half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap.  On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention.  What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track.  There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale.  It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig—­which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave—­had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House.  In his port was the dignity of one who had borne His Majesty’s commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne.  How unlike alas the hangdog look of a republican official, who, as