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 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.
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