smen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in
considerable numbers; among whom, likewise, were many rough figures,
whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the
forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the
colony.

On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years
past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by
its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had
the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline;
while, again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight
indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own
illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the towns-people, showed
the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was
like a mask; or, rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's
features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed
out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and
have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance
and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after
sustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years as
a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to
endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a
kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and its
wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they
fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be
beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean
will quench and hide forever the symbol which ye have caused to burn
upon her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be
assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in
Hester's mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom
from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.
Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long,
breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly
all her years of womanhood had