REWRITING HAWTHORNE

The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the girm and grisly presence of the town beadle, with a sword by his side and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the prison door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little faced from the too vivid light of day: because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquinted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.

 

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