 than any thing 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-peru,
and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the
soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized 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 symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that
may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human
frailty and sorrow.
 

                              II. The Market-Place

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not
less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the
inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped
oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of
New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these
good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have
betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on
whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public
sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of
this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish
bond-servant
