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念陳陳
2016-05-18 加入
chapter1 the prison door
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 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, 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.
这个孩子是另一种形式的红字，是被赋予了生命的红字！
It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!
这是一座木结构的大房子，建筑的样式，在我们较古老的城镇的街道上仍可找到此类样本，不过如今青苔丛生，倾颓欲倒。在那些阴暗的房间里发生过或消逝了的许多悲欢离合的故事，有的依然记忆犹新，有的已游丝难觅，但都让人触景生情，黯然神伤。但在当时，这座大宅还保持着清新如初的外表，从洒满阳光的窗户里传出居家的欢言笑语，死亡还没有降临此屋。
This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now moss—grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away within their dusky chambers.Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant–wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful.
It's like the moon when the sun comes out. You don't know it's there any more.
How absurd to call youth the time of happiness -youth , the time of greatest vunlnerablitility!