Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a
steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget, and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and
a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so
highly burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination
everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle
show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the Pequod war.
For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and
Finch, as his professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had
transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman and
ruler.
    Little Pearl - who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as she
had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house - spent some time looking
into the polished mirror of the breastplate.
    »Mother,« cried she, »I see you here. Look! Look!«
    Hester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw that, owing to the
peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in
exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent
feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.
Pearl pointed upward, also, at a similar picture in the headpiece; smiling at
her mother, with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on
her small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in
the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester
Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who
was seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.
    »Come along, Pearl!« said she, drawing her away. »Come and look into this
fair garden. It may be, we shall see flowers there; more beautiful ones than we
find in the woods.«
    Pearl, accordingly, ran to the bow-window, at the farther end of the hall,
and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with closely shaven grass,
and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the
proprietor appeared already to have relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to
perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil and amid the close
struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening.
Cabbages grew in plain sight;