 a
golden beam into the study, and laid it right across the minister's bedazzled
eyes. There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast,
immeasurable tract of written space behind him!
 

                          XXI. The New England Holiday

Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to receive his
office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and little Pearl came into the
market-place. It was already thronged with the craftsmen 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
townspeople, 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 for ever the symbol which ye have
caused to
