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 town’s brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only
Salem knew the way thither,—I chanced to lay my hand on a small
package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment.
This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long
past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more
substantial materials than at present. There was something about it
that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded
red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure
would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the
parchment cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and
seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of
his Majesty’s Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay. I remember to have read (probably in Felt’s Annals)
a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years
ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the
digging up of his remains in the little graveyard of St. Peter’s
Church, during the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call
to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect
skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic
frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very
satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers which the
parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr.
Pue’s mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the
frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,
or at least written in his private capacity, and apparently with his
own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of
Custom-House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue’s death had happened
suddenly; and that these papers, which he probably kept in his
official desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were
supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of
the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public
concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I suppose, at that early
day, with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted
some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian,
and other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material
for petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up
with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in
the preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the
present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes
equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so
far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration
for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they
shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and competent, to
take the unprofitable labor off my hands. As a final disposition, I
contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society.

But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package,
was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There
were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly
frayed and defaced; so that none, or very little, of the glitter was
left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful
skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies
conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art,
not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads.
This rag of scarlet cloth,—for time and wear and a sacrilegious moth
had reduced it to little other than a rag,—on careful examination,
assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an
accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three inches
and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no
doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn,
or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by
it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in
these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely
interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet
letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep
meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were,
streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to
my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.

While thus perplexed,—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether
the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the
white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of Indians,—I
happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,—the reader may
smile, but must not doubt my word,—it seemed to me, then, that I
experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, of
burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot
iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

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 as
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 splendor that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike,
alas! the hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant
of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the
lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen
but majestic figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the
little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he
had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and
reverence towards him,—who might reasonably regard himself as my
official ancestor,—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations
before the public. “Do this,” said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,
emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its
memorable wig,—“do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You
will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine,
when a man’s office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom.
But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your
predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightfully due!” And I
said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, “I will!”

On Hester Prynne’s story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was
the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and
fro across my room, or traversing, with a hundred-fold repetition, the
long extent from the front-door of the Custom-House to the
side-entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance
of the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were
disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and
returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to
say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably
fancied that my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a
sane man could ever put himself into voluntary motion—was, to get an
appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by
the east wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only
valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted
is the atmosphere of a custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy
and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies
yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would
ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a
tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable
by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would
take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but
retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face
with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. “What have you
to do with us?” that expression seemed to say. “The little power you
might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You
have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn
your wages!” In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy
twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks, and
rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom and
reluctantly—I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of
Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought
the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The
same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort,
accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most
absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I
sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire
and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs,
with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
bookcase; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to
lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire
dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or
played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as
by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and
fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,
without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form
beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the
effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and
ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of
human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such
an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone,
cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need
never try to write romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them,—of no great richness or value, but the best
I had,—was gone from me.

It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous
coloring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was
a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age;
or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter,
when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was
broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser
effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through
the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright
transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so
heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that
lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary
characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The
page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and
commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A
better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At
some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments
and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page.