Difficulty Paper- Scarlett letter

The Scarlett Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, so far, has talked about a woman, Hester Prynne, who has been convicted adultery. This is the actual story, however the introduction of the story was confusing to me. If I understood some of it right, I think it says that Hawthorne, or whoever is the narrator, finds a book or some pages and then he begins to read them. I think at first they describe the world, that the person who wrote them, is living in. I think he finds the Scarlett letter A, which we later find out is Prynne’s. I’m not really sure if the other stuff said are the narrator’s words or if it’s still part of the pages that he is reading. Is the actual story being written by the narrator or is it being read from the pages found? Also, I don’t know if my reasoning and summary are correct so I would appreciate if someone could correct the summary and answer my question.

Difficulty Paper- Minister's Black Veil

The short story The Minister’s Black Veil, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a story about a minister who decides to wear to cover his face with a black veil. The minister decides one day to cover his face and it makes all of the townspeople question him. They think that he has committed a terrible sin, since that can be the only explanation according to them, and also because he gave his sermon on sins, which was implied by the townspeople that it was about the minister. I really enjoyed this story, it was very interesting but there was something that was hard for me to understand. At the end of the story, the minister says that while he was wearing the veil, everyone was thinking that he had done something bad, but then he said it was the people that were bad because they were avoiding him and kids had screamed out of horror. What I got out of this was that he had the veil on to prove that the townspeople and everyone else were very judgmental on looks, which is a sin. The last lines though is what made me think twice, “  Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave... but awful is still the thought that it [his face] mouldered beneath the Black Veil!” (Hawthorne last paragraph). I was confused on the part where it says his awful face beneath the black veil. Does this mean that the minister really committed a sin? Was the minister saying that the people were judgmental as an excuse for something that he really did?