Page 47 - THE SCARLET LETTER

The Scarlet Letter

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the
earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House
having, probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the
king’s officials accompanied the British army in its flight

from Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me;
for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate,
those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs,
which would have affected me with the same pleasure as
when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the field
near the Old Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make
a discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing
into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one
and another document, and reading the names of vessels
that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants never heard of now on
‘Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy
tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened,
weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the
corpse of dead activity—and exerting my fancy, sluggish
with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image
of the old towns brighter aspect, when India was a new
region, and only Salem knew the way thither—I chanced

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