.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what passed
for play with those sombre little urchins,--and spake gravely one to
another:--

"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a
truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running
along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"

But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her
foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening
gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put
them all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an
infant pestilence,--the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel
of judgment,--whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising
generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of
sound, which, doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake
within them. The victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her
mother, and looked up, smiling, into her face.

Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which
there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns;
now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the
many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that
have happened, and passed away, within their dusky chambers. Then,
however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior,
and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a
human habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed,
a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully
intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front
of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been
flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have
befitted Aladdin's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old
Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly
cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the
age, which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had
now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times.

Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and
dance, and imperatively required t