The Welcome back everyone. The one thousand one classic short stories and tales. This is your host John Hagadorn. A few weeks ago I promised to get

back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and I'm going to do that today with the story Rappacini's daughter.

Many people consider this story to be one of Hawthorne's scariest stories, and in some ways

it is.

As we approach Halloween, it's a fitting way to get things started.

This is one of those stories that's often taught in college and high school English classes.

It's got a ton of symbolism in it.

It presents the basic themes of good and evil and the effect of

scientific programs upon humanity when used for power or gain. That can lead

to some pretty interesting table top conversations,

especially when you switch out experimental vaccines for plant poisons.

Remember that one as you go through.

That would set the local book club tabletop on fire.

Enjoy.

Part one of our two-part story Rappacini's daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne begins now.

A young man named Giovanni Kaskante came very long ago from the more southern region of Italy to pursue studies at the University of Padua.

Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy

chamber of an old edifice which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Padua noble, and which in fact exhibited over its entrance the

armorial bearings of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country,

recollected that one of the ancestors of his family, and perhaps an occupant of this very

mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his inferno.

These reminiscences and associations, together with the tendency to heartbreak, natural to a young man

...