TEXT DESCRIPTION: Surveyor Pue and Hawthorne. A transparent green figure hands a package to Hawthorne, who turns from sorting through parcels in the Custom House storage room. The package has a large red letter "A" on the outside. The ghost of Pue is quite stout, and has a long curly ("frizzled") wig. He wears an old-fashioned long coat and breeches, holds a three-cornered hat under his arm, carries a cane, and wears buckled shoes. Hawthorne looks a little surprised, as he is seated facing away from Pue and Hawthorne looks in Pue's face, not at the paper. He is frozen in the act of putting down another loose paper, but also he seems determined to carry out the task that Surveyor Pue sets for him: to write a book about the Scarlet Letter affair.
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Illustration is by Hugh Thomson, from an edition of The Scarlet Letter by George H. Doran, Company, New York, printed by Morrison and Gibb Limited, Edinburgh, no date or copyright notice. The color illustrations are tipped in, approximately the size of this screen rendering. Note that the JPEG file here is at 150 dpi, it has been electronically enhanced to add saturation to the faded colors of the print edition, at 75% compression it loses a little content, and the image has been artificially blurred so as to make the dots of the printing process fuse in the screen image.