bodily pain.
Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he
shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and
was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the
hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much
misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were
bandying it to and fro.

"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands.
"The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!"

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater
power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town
did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry
either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of
witches; whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over
the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through
the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,
uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows
of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance, on the
line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate
himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a
long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked
unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At
another window of the same house, moreover, appeared old Mistress
Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which, even thus far
off, revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She
thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr.
Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and night-hags, with
whom she was well known to make excursions into the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady
quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up
among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The
magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness,--into which,
nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a
mill-stone,--retired from the window.

The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a lo