英文名著精选阅读:《红字》第二章(上)
Chapter 02 THE MARKET-PLACE
第二章 市场
THE grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitantsof Boston; all with their eyes intentlyfastenedon the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grimrigiditythat petrifiedthe bearded physiognomiesof these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokenednothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunalhad but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severityof the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitablybe drawn. It might be, that a sluggishbond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodoxreligionist, was to be scourgedout of the town, or an idle and vagrantIndian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotousabout the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnityof demeanouron the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerableand awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressormight look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penaltywhich, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamyand ridicule, might then be invested with almost as sterna dignity as the punishment of death itself.
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