The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: altogether he seemed -- not young, indeed -- but a kind of new
contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and
infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which
perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of
the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they
came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the
blast of a clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal -- and
there was very little else to look at -- he was a most
satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and
wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme
age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever
 The Scarlet Letter |