ss which came over him, that the
last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety; although his
mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of
lurid playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole
in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing
stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted
whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold.
Morning would break, and find him there. The neighborhood would begin
to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim
twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place
of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go,
knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the
ghost--as he needs must think it--of some defunct transgressor. A
dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then--the
morning light still waxing stronger--old patriarchs would rise up in
great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without
pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous
personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of
their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a
nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly
forth, with his King James's ruff fastened askew; and Mistress
Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and
looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after
her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the
night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out
of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come
the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young
virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him
in their white bosoms; which now, by the by, in their hurry and
confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with
their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over
their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken
visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the
red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing
where Hester Prynne had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawar