our theories, and perhaps held themselves ready
to unite in our actual experiment, as soon as there should appear a reliable
promise of its success. It was rather ludicrous, indeed, (to me, at least, whose
enthusiasm had insensibly been exhaled, together with the perspiration of many a
hard day's toil,) it was absolutely funny, therefore, to observe what a glory
was shed about our life and labors, in the imagination of these longing
proselytes. In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians, besides being as
practical as the hardest-fisted husbandmen in Massachusetts. We did not, it is
true, spend much time in piping to our sheep, or warbling our innocent loves to
the sisterhood. But they gave us credit for imbuing the ordinary rustic
occupations with a kind of religious poetry, insomuch that our very cow-yards
and pig-sties were as delightfully fragrant as a flower-garden. Nothing used to
please me more than to see one of these lay enthusiasts snatch up a hoe, as they
were very prone to do, and set to work with a vigor that perhaps carried him
through about a dozen ill-directed strokes. Men are wonderfully soon satisfied,
in this day of shameful bodily enervation, when, from one end of life to the
other, such multitudes never taste the sweet weariness that follows accustomed
toil. I seldom saw the new enthusiasm that did not grow as flimsy and flaccid as
the proselyte's moistened shirt-collar, with a quarter-of-an-hour's active
labor, under a July sun.
    But the person, now at hand, had not at all the air of one of these amiable
visionaries. He was an elderly man, dressed rather shabbily, yet decently
enough, in a gray frock-coat, faded towards a brown hue, and wore a
broad-brimmed white hat, of the fashion of several years gone by. His hair was
perfect silver, without a dark thread in the whole of it; his nose, though it
had a scarlet tip, by no means indicated the jollity of which a red nose is the
generally admitted symbol. He was a subdued, undemonstrative old man, who would
doubtless drink a glass of liquor, now and then, and probably more than was good
for him; not, however, with a purpose of undue exhilaration, but in the hope of
bringing his spirits up to the ordinary level of the world's cheerfulness.
Drawing nearer, there was a shy look about him, as if he were ashamed of his
poverty, or,