istened with such intentness, and
sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning
for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These,
perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser
medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low
undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended
with it, as it rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and
power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of
awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes
became, there was forever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish,--the whisper, or
the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that
touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of
pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a
desolate silence. But even when the minister's voice grew high and
commanding,--when it gushed irrepressibly upward,--when it assumed its
utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its
way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open
air,--still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he
could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a
human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret,
whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching
its sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and
never in vain! It was this profound and continual undertone that gave
the clergyman his most appropriate power.

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would
nevertheless have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence
she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense
within her,--too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing
heavily on her mind,--that her whole orb of life, both before and
after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave
it unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre
crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray; even as a bird of
bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage, by darting
to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the
clustering lea