THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 1

图书介绍

• Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments, and grey, steeple-crowned hats,      
    intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front      
    of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with      
    iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might      
    originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical      
    necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as      
    the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the      
    forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of      
    Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac      
    Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the      
    congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some      
    fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already      
    marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to      
    its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door      
    looked more antique than any thing else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime,      
    it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and      
    the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed,      
    apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in      
    the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But, on      
    one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered,      
    in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their      
    fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal      
    as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be      
    kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had      
    merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic      
    pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it- or whether, as there is fair authority for      
    believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she      
    entered the prison-door- we shall not take upon us to determine.

Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue      
    from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers,      
    and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral      
    blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of      
    human frailty and sorrow.     
   

1. Ebooks list page : 86
2. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 9
3. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 20
4. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 23
5. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 1
6. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 2
7. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 3
8. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 4
9. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 6
10. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 5
11. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 8
12. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 7
13. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 10
14. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 11
15. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 12
16. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 13
17. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 14
18. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 15
19. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 16
20. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 18
21. THE SCARLET LETTER: CHAPTER 19

• Download Thousands of Books!
• Download millions of Usenet resources!

1. 艺术设计
2. 有声读物
3. 语言文化
4. 家庭生活
5. 法律
6. 音乐歌词
7. 软件相关
8. BT种子
9. 其它图书
10. 所有留言
12. 留言评论
13. Download Thousands of Books two weeks for FREE!
14. Download millions of Usenet resources!
15. Exam1Pass-Latest IT Certification Study Guide for IT Exams
16. Meetexams
17. 640-802
18. Needking
19. Passshope
20. 海淀驾校

• 推荐到 StumbleUpon!
• del.icio.us
• Google书签
•