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Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the
town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close
vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched
cottage. It had been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned,
because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while
its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that
social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants.
It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the
forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby
trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much
conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was
some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be,
concealed. In this little lonesome dwelling, with some slender
means that she possessed, and by the licence of the magistrates,
who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her,
Hester established herself, with her infant child. A mystic
shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.
Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be
shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh
enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or
standing in the doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or
coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and, discerning
the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off with a
strange contagious fear.
Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth
who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of
want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that
afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply
food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then,
as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp--of
needle-work. She bore on her breast, in the curiously
embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative
skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed
themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of
human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed,
in the sable simplicity that generally characterised the
Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for
the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the
age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this
kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern
progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it
might seem harder to dispense with.
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