riginally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one
side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited
to their respective employments, in both minister and man of physic.
The motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front
apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains, to create
a noontide shadow, when desirable. The walls were hung round with
tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events,
representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan
the Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which made the fair woman
of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer.
Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with
parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and
monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they
vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often
to avail themselves. On the other side of the house old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern
man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with
a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and
chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to
purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned
persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly
passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and
not incurious inspection into one another's business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as we
have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence
had done all this, for the purpose--besought in so many public, and
domestic, and secret prayers--of restoring the young minister to
health. But--it must now be said--another portion of the community had
latterly begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr.
Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed
multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be
deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on
the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus
attained are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess the
character of truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case
of which we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger
Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious refutation.
There was