A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and greysteeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearinghoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a woodenedifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, andstudded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtueand happiness they might originally project, have invariablyrecognised it among their earliest practical necessities toallot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and anotherportion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule itmay safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had builtthe 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, whichsubsequently became the nucleus of all the congregatedsepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it isthat, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of thetown, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains andother indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to itsbeetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderousiron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anythingelse in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, itseemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this uglyedifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was agrass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern,and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found somethingcongenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flowerof 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, whichmight be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty tothe prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as hecame forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Naturecould pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive inhistory; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern oldwilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines andoaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there isfair authority for believing, it had sprung up under thefootsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered theprison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding itso directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is nowabout to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly dootherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to thereader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moralblossom that may be found along the track, or relieve thedarkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.