The Scarlet Letter - Page 15/161

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a

discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the

heaped-up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and another

document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago

foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of

merchants never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily

decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters

with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we

bestow on the corpse of dead activity--and exerting my fancy,

sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an

image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new

region, and only Salem knew the way thither--I chanced to lay my

hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient

yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an official

record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their

stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than

at present. There was something about it that quickened an

instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape that

tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here

be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment

cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of

Governor Shirley, in favour of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of

His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, in the Province of

Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's

"Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about

fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent

times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little

graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that

edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my

respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some

fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle, which,

unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory

preservation. But, on examining the papers which the parchment

commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's

mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the

frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private

nature, or, at least, written in his private capacity, and

apparently with his own hand. I could account for their being

included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by the fact

that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly, and that these

papers, which he probably kept in his official desk, had never

come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to relate

to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives

to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern,

was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.