C 1
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 far 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
