I. THE PRISON DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments
and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed 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.
