scarlet letter

A prison door is surrounded by a group of Puritan settlers. They are dressed in dark, simple clothing, and wear serious expressions. Just to the side of the door is a single wild rose bush, covered with flowers because it is June, rose season:

"[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, 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." The townspeople talk about the prison's captive, a woman named Hester...