The pink ribbons in Faith’s cap and the Brown’s forest companion’s staff are both introduced in symbolic terms:  the pink ribbons represent faith in its purest form, child-like; while the staff represents evil in its earliest literary form, as a serpent.                                                               All of the aforementioned allegories dissipate, as if they are in the “gloom” of Brown’s forest, thus deflating Lavy’s “expectation[s].”  The allegorical quality of the character Faith crumbles under Hawthorne’s building up of a literal person:  “She talks of dreams, too.”  (Hawthorne/p.937).  By intermittently building Faith as a literal character in the exposition he allows the allegory to breathe air into its lungs; however, by the end of the story he has deprived it of almost any life at all, leaving the reader to see the use of Faith more as a pun than as an allegory.