fiction and reality. Furthermore, the scene was in good keeping
with the personages whom he desired to introduce.
    These characters, he feels it right to say, are entirely fictitious. It
would, indeed, (considering how few amiable qualities he distributes among his
imaginary progeny,) be a most grievous wrong to his former excellent associates,
were the Auther to allow it to be supposed that he has been sketching any of
their likenesses. Had he attempted it, they would at least have recognized the
touches of a friendly pencil. But he has done nothing of the kind. The
self-concentrated Philanthropist; the high-spirited Woman, bruising herself
against the narrow limitations of her sex; the weakly Maiden, whose tremulous
nerves endow her with Sibylline attributes; the Minor Poet, beginning life with
strenuous aspirations, which die out with his youthful fervor - all these might
have been looked for, at BROOK FARM, but, by some accident, never made their
appearance there.
    The Author cannot close his reference to this subject, without expressing a
most earnest wish that some one of the many cultivated and philosophic minds,
which took an interest in that enterprise, might now give the world its history.
Ripley, with whom rests the honorable paternity of the Institution, Dana,
Dwight, Channing, Burton, Parker, for instance - with others, whom he dares not
name, because they veil themselves from the public eye - among these is the
ability to convey both the outward narrative and the inner truth and spirit of
the whole affair, together with the lessons which those years of thought and
toil must have elaborated, for the behoof of future experimentalists. Even the
brilliant Howadji might find as rich a theme in his youthful reminiscenses of
BROOK FARM, and a more novel one - close at hand as it lies - than those which
he has since made so distant a pilgrimage to seek, in Syria, and along the
current of the Nile.
    
    CONCORD (Mass.), May, 1852.
 

                                 I. Old Moodie

The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my
bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled
Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part
of the street.
    »Mr. Coverdale,« said he, softly, »can I speak with you a moment?«
    As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to
mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with her now
forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric line;