Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in the fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our elder towns; now moss-grown, crumbling to decay and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that when the sunshine fell aslantwise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brillancy might have befitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age, which had been drawn in the stucco, when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times.
Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.
"No, my little Pearl!" said her mother; "thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee!"
~The Scarlet Letter ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
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