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 recognised 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-hush, 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.