And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next morning, it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been.  Arriving at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident as at some former periods that this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could possibly be taken.  It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed, after drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride myself in those days.  It was the very last bottle; and I finished it, with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.

II.  BLITHEDALE

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache), there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale.  It was a wood fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.  Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of more inspiring breath.  Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for my finger-ends!  The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out.  Their genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from damp fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer through a forest.  Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed!  Nobody else in the world, I am bold to affirm—­nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England,—­ had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the tropic.  Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve’s bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux.  But we made a summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.

It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle of the month.  When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature was mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself, in one of the midmost houses of a brick block,—­each house partaking of the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its individual furnace—­heat.  But towards noon there had come snow, driven along the street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening