The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny freshness, through my memory.  I know not why it should be so.  But my mental eye can even now discern the September grass, bordering the pleasant roadside with a brighter verdure than while the summer heats were scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green, although here and there a branch or shrub has donned its vesture of crimson and gold a week or two before its fellows.  I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their small clusters of scarlet fruit; the toadstools, likewise,—­some spotlessly white, others yellow or red,—­mysterious growths, springing suddenly from no root or seed, and growing nobody can tell how or wherefore.  In this respect they resembled many of the emotions in my breast.  And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear, and bright, that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean rocks, and deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish were darting to and fro, and within which lurked the hermit frog.  But no,—­I never can account for it, that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story, and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose, I should examine these things so like a peaceful-bosomed naturalist.  Nor why, amid all my sympathies and fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration through my frame.

Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland, and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond the suburbs of a town.  Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!  They glided mistily before me, as I walked.  Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had given up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine.  What had I ever had to do with them?  And why, being now free, should I take this thraldom on me once again?  It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors, and the misfortunes of individuals who stood within a circle of their own, into which, if I stept at all, it must be as an intruder, and at a peril that I could not estimate.

Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy.  I indulged in a hundred odd and extravagant conjectures.  Either there was no such place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it was all changed during my absence.  It had been nothing but dream work and enchantment.  I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse, and for the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I had imagined.  It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness.