 his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the
ministers of the town; all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the
meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such personages could
constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of
rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal
sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was
sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might,
under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her,
and concentred at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an
impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the
stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety
of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of
the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances
contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of
laughter burst from the multitude, - each man, each woman, each little
shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts, - Hester Prynne might
have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden
infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must
needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the
scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
    Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most
conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered
indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept
bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the
edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from
beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most
trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish
quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back
upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her
subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of
similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device
of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric
forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.
    Be that as
