ase thy ship with a tempest!"

Pursuing a zigzag course across the market-place, the child returned
to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester's
strong, calm, steadfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on
beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom,
which--at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister
and herself out of their labyrinth of misery--showed itself, with an
unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.

With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to
another trial. There were many people present, from the country round
about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had
been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who
had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after
exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne
with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however,
it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At
that distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal
force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole
gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and
learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their
sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians
were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity,
and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes
on Hester's bosom; conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this
brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high
dignity among her people. Lastly the inhabitants of the town (their
own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same
quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest,
with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester
saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who
had awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door, seven years ago; all
save one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose
burial-robe she had since made. At the final hour, when she was so
soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely become the
centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her
breast more pain