As I was reading "Black Veil", I realized that this story is basically trying to say the same thing about Puritanism that The Scarlet Letter is. Hawthorne, being an anti-Transcendentalist, was apparently really trying to drive the point home about how he felt about it, which is cool and everything but I don't see the point of writing the same story twice. Now, it's not bad by any standards and Hawthorne's prose is very easy to understand, but I've read this exact plot before. (