Describe the govenor's home, both out and inside; what point might Hawthorne be making?

The house is grand in contrast with Hester's solitary cottage.

"This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our elder towns; now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have happened, and passed away, within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human habitation into which death had never entered. It had indeed a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin’s palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. "

The point here is that most all of the villagers live quite humbly if not in poverty. They are out of touch with the day to day lives of people yet they sit in justice over Hester. Hester also has Pearl who is literally priceless. Amidst the pomp and pageantry of the hall, Pearl is the one person that lights it up. She is pure and the product of love. Ironically these men, who are quite the opposite, are there to judge her as a "demon child".