Chapter 1
THE PRISON DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments
and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed
with women, some wearing hoods, and others
bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered
with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia
of human virtue and happiness they might originally
project, have invariably recognised it among
their earliest practical necessities to allot
a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery,
and another portion as the site of a prison.
In accordance with this rule it may safely
be assumed that the forefathers of Boston
had built the first prison-house somewhere
in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably
as they marked out the first burial-ground,
on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his
grave, which subsequently became the nucleus
of all the congregated sepulchres in the old
churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is
that, some fifteen or twenty years after the
settlement of the town, the wooden jail was
already marked with weather-stains and other
indications of age, which gave a yet darker
aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front.
The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its
oaken door looked more antique than anything
else in the New World. Like all that pertains
to crime, it seemed never to have known a
youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and
between it and the wheel-track of the street,
was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock,
pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation,
which evidently found something congenial
in the soil that had so early borne the black
flower of civilised society, a prison. But
on one side of the portal, and rooted almost
at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered,
in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance
and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went
in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep
heart of Nature could pity and be kind to
him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been
kept alive in history; but whether it had
merely survived out of the stern old wilderness,
so long after the fall of the gigantic pines
and oaks that originally overshadowed it,
or whether, as there is fair authority for
believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps
of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered
the prison-door, we shall not take upon us
to determine. Finding it so directly on the
threshold of our narrative, which is now about
to issue from that inauspicious portal, we
could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of
its flowers, and present it to the reader.
It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some
sweet moral blossom that may be found along
the track, or relieve the darkening close
of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
