I.-THE PRISON-DOOR.

A throng of bearded men,
in sad-colored garments, and
gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed
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.A throngThe founders of a new colony,
whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might
originally project, have invariably recognized 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, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly
vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil
that had so early borne the black flower of civilized 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 fair
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 symbolize some sweet moral blossom,
that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening
close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.