, the yeoman-life throve well with us. Our faces
took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our shoulders in
breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if they had never been
capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe, the scythe, and the hay-fork, grew
familiar to our grasp. The oxen responded to our voices. We could do almost as
fair a day's work as Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake
at daybreak with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite
gone by breakfast-time.
    To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our real
proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told slanderous
fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive them afield, when
yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their conjugal bond at nightfall. They
had the face to say, too, that the cows laughed at our awkwardness at
milking-time, and invariably kicked over the pails; partly in consequence of our
putting the stool on the wrong side, and partly because, taking offence at the
whisking of their tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural
flyflappers with one hand, and milking with the other. They further averred,
that we hoed up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth
carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock,
mistaking them for cabbages; and that, by dint of unskilful planting, few of our
seeds ever came up at all, or if they did come up, it was stern foremost, and
that we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a field of
beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way. They
quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or other of us to
crop off two or three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy use of the
hay-cutter. Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues
circulated a report that we Communitarians were exterminated, to the last man,
by severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own scythes! - and that the
world had lost nothing by this little accident.
    But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring farmers.
The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming
practical agriculturalists, but that we should probably cease to be anything
else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we