Bab Bab 1 · THE PRISON DOOR

. THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey

steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and

others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door

of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and

happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it

among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the

virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the

forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the

vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first

burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which

subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in

the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen

or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was

already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which

gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The

rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique

than anything 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-pern, and such unsightly

vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that

had so early borne the black flower of civilised 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 symbolise 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.