" . . . aware of the presence of his Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street...."

He goes "wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and everybody's wonder and repugnance...," incurring "the ridicule of the younger crowd." Clifford is "goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel laughter--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would fling upon him...."

The town is "almost completely water-girdled," so he discovers "the wharves stretched out towards the centre of the harbor, each wharf a solitude." He bends "one moment, over the deep, black tide" and thinks "that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe...."

He is "an impressible person, standing alone over the brink of ... a mighty river ... massive in its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to the kindred depth within him...." "It might so fascinate him, that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream...."

"So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale, he threw an appealing look.... At last, with tremulous limbs, he started up, set his foot ... and, in an instant more, would have been in the..."

Clifford is "a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks floating in the wind ... a lonely being, estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him.... But whether impelled by the species of terror, that sometimes urges its victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural magnetism, tending towards the great centre ... it were not easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once."

Hawthorne describes the process of drowning in detail, a matter of "whirling sticks, straws, and all such trifles, round and round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen.... At his decease, there is only vacancy, and a momentary eddy--very small, as compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object--and a bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth, and bursting at the surface."

---

Hawthorne displayed such deliberate skill in arranging these fragments to conceal his true meaning that an admiring Herman Melville could not resist modeling the sinking of the Pequod on the sinking of Clifford. Melville's Ishmael is slowly drawn to the vortex of the whirlpool created by the plunging ship; "Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the buttonlike black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst..."

---