Hawthorne's Short Stories Read Online Free

forms and the forces that separate men from one another or distinguish sharply among them; he had no respect whatever for rank or caste or class, and he had almost as little for the intellectual ranks or classes that serve only too often to keep men apart. His real faith, quite “paradoxically,” was in what he called the heart. Much that he saw there was terrible enough, but humanly speaking he believed in nothing else—in nothing, that is, except in the capacities that equalize instead of dividing men, in the affections that draw them together, in imaginative sympathy and the sense of a common brotherhood in error and suffering. His conviction is quite clear that what is wrong can be righted by nothing unless by love. This may be, like Melville’s, a tragic version of the democratic faith; that is hardly to say that it is an unphilosophical one.
    N EWTON A RVIN .
    1 Two of the tales in this volume, “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “The Antique Ring,” were never reprinted by Hawthorne himself after their first appearance. They were included by his editor in editions of his works published after his death.

Twice-Told Tales

THE GRAY CHAMPION
    T HERE was once a time when New England groaned under the actual pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the Revolution. James II., the bigoted successor of Charles the Voluptuous, had annulled the charters of all the colonies, and sent a harsh and unprincipled soldier to take away our liberties and endanger our religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely a single characteristic of tyranny: a Governor and Council, holding office from the King, and wholly independent of the country; laws made and taxes levied without concurrence of the people immediate or by their representatives; the rights of private citizens violated, and the titles of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint stifled by restrictions on the press; and, finally, disaffection overawed by the first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on our free soil. For two years our ancestors were kept in sullen submission by that filial love which had invariably secured their allegiance to the mother country, whether its head chanced to be a Parliament, Protector, or Popish Monarch. Till these evil times, however, such allegiance had been merely nominal, and the colonists had ruled themselves, enjoying far more freedom than is even yet the privilege of the native subjects of Great Britain.
    At length a rumor reached our shores that the Prince of Orange had ventured on an enterprise, the success of which would be the triumph of civil and religious rights and the salvation of New England. It was but a doubtful whisper: it might be false, or the attempt might fail; and, in either case, the man that stirred against King James would lose his head. Still the intelligenceproduced a marked effect. The people smiled mysteriously in the streets, and threw bold glances at their oppressors; while far and wide there was a subdued and silent agitation, as if the slightest signal would rouse the whole land from its sluggish despondency. Aware of their danger, the rulers resolved to avert it by an imposing display of strength, and perhaps to confirm their despotism by yet harsher measures. One afternoon in April, 1689, Sir Edmund Andros and his favorite councillors, being warm with wine, assembled the red-coats of the Governor’s Guard, and made their appearance in the streets of Boston. The sun was near setting when the march commenced.
    The roll of the drum at that unquiet crisis seemed to go through the streets, less as the martial music of the soldiers, than as a muster-call to the inhabitants themselves. A multitude, by various avenues, assembled in King Street, which was destined to be the scene, nearly a century afterwards, of another encounter between the troops of Britain, and a people struggling against her tyranny. Though more than sixty years had elapsed