round with tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events,
representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the
Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene
almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here, the pale
clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers,
and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines,
even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained
often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of
science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised
alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of
situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own
domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a
mutual and not incurious inspection into one another's business.
    And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as we have
intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had done all
this, for the purpose - besought in so many public, and domestic, and secret
prayers - of restoring the young minister to health. But - it must now be said -
another portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view of the
relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an
uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to
be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the
intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often
so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character of truths
supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak, could
justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy
of serious refutation. There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had
been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, now some
thirty years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under some other
name, which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Doctor
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of Overbury.
Two or three individuals hinted, that the man of skill, during his Indian
captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments by joining in the