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.