Little Joe’s face brightened at once.
“Dear father,” cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, “that strange man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!”
“Yes,” growled the lime-burner with an oath, “but he has let the fire go down, and no thanks to him, if five hundred bushels of lime are not spoilt. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again I shall feel like tossing him into the furnace!”
With his long pole in his hand he ascended to the top of the kiln. After a moment’s pause he called to his son.
“Come up here, Joe!” said he.
So little Joe ran up the hillock and stood by his father’s side. The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in the midst of the circle—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime-lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was the shape of a human heart.
“Was the fellow’s heart made of marble?” cried Bartram, in some perplexity at this phenomenon. “At any rate, it is burnt into what looks like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my kiln is half a bushel the richer for him.”
So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and letting it fall upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crum- . bled into fragments.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948).
Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952; rev. ed., 1964).
Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955; rev. ed., 1963).
Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Michael Davitt Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).d
Neal Frank Doubleday, Hawthorne’s Early Tales: A Critical Study (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972).
Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976).
Kenneth Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).
Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Carol Marie Bensick, La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985).
1 Did Governor Endicott speak less positively, we should suspect a mistake here. The Rev. Mr. Blackstone, though an eccentric, is not known to have been an immoral man. We rather doubt his identity with the priest of Merry Mount.
2 Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day till the hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.
3 The physical fact, to which it is here attempted to give a moral signification, has been known to occur in more than one instance.
Selected Tales and Sketches Page 49