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Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his
limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the
night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the steps
of the scaffold. Morning would break and find him there The
neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser,
coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and
half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost--as
he needs must think it--of some defunct transgressor. A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then--the
morning light still waxing stronger--old patriarchs would
rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly
dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole
tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen
with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public
view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old
Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James'
ruff fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about
the glorified saints. Hither, likewise,
would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church,
and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had
made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which now,
by-the-bye, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have
given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people,
in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and
turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages around the
scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern
light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,
half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where
Hester Prynne had stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the
minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a
great peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a
light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart--but
he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as
acute--he recognised the tones of little Pearl.
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