I mentioned those rumors to Hollingsworth in a playful way.

“Had you consulted me,” I went on to observe, “I should have recommended a site farther to the left, just a little withdrawn into the wood, with two or three peeps at the prospect among the trees.  You will be in the shady vale of years long before you can raise any better kind of shade around your cottage, if you build it on this bare slope.”

“But I offer my edifice as a spectacle to the world,” said Hollingsworth, “that it may take example and build many another like it.  Therefore, I mean to set it on the open hillside.”

Twist these words how I might, they offered no very satisfactory import.  It seemed hardly probable that Hollingsworth should care about educating the public taste in the department of cottage architecture, desirable as such improvement certainly was.

X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN

Hollingsworth and I—­we had been hoeing potatoes, that forenoon, while the rest of the fraternity were engaged in a distant quarter of the farm—­sat under a clump of maples, eating our eleven o’clock lunch, when we saw a stranger approaching along the edge of the field.  He had admitted himself from the roadside through a turnstile, and seemed to have a purpose of speaking with us.

And, by the bye, we were favored with many visits at Blithedale, especially from people who sympathized with 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 imaginations 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.