
spring up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of
force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.
    In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town,
as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and
intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his studies,
at a previous period of his life, had made him extensively acquainted with the
medical science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented himself, and
as such was cordially received. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical
profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear,
partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic.
In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more
subtile faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the
spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism,
which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all
events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to
do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and
apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his
favor, than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only
surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the
daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger
Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity
with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every
remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as
elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In
his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties
of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these
simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a
share of his own confidence as the European pharmacopoeia, which so many learned
doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
    This learned stranger was exemplary, as regarded at least the outward forms
of a religious life, and, early after his arrival, had chosen for his spiritual
guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose scholar-like renown
still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heaven-ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labor for the
ordinary term of life,
