Pigs!  Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude for this?  And again, in reference to some discussion about raising early vegetables for the market:—­“We shall never make any hand at market gardening,” said Silas Foster, “unless the women folks will undertake to do all the weeding.  We haven’t team enough for that and the regular farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth one common field-hand.  No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a little too early in the morning, to compete with the market gardeners round Boston.”

It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor.  But, to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood.  Nor could this fail to be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and better half of society should range itself on our side.  Constituting so pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual bond among ourselves.

This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner consciousness by the entrance of Zenobia.  She came with the welcome intelligence that supper was on the table.  Looking at herself in the glass, and perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid (probably by being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw away a faded violet.  The action seemed proper to her character, although, methought, it would still more have befitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded ones by her touch.  Nevertheless, it was a singular but irresistible effect; the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us to live in.  I tried to analyze this impression, but not with much success.

“It really vexes me,” observed Zenobia, as we left the room, “that Mr. Hollingsworth should be such a laggard.  I should not have thought him at all the sort of person to be turned back by a puff of contrary wind, or a few snowflakes drifting into his face.”

“Do you know Hollingsworth personally?” I inquired.

“No; only as an auditor—­auditress, I mean—­of some of his lectures,” said she.  “What a voice he has! and what a man he is!  Yet not so much an intellectual man, I should say, as a great heart; at least, he moved me more deeply than I think myself capable of being moved, except by the stroke of a true, strong heart against my own.  It is a sad pity that he should have devoted his glorious powers to such a grimy, unbeautiful, and positively hopeless object as this reformation of criminals, about which he makes himself and his wretchedly small audiences so very miserable.  To tell you a secret, I never could tolerate a philanthropist before.  Could you?”