“Haw, Buck!” quoth he.  “Come along there, ye lazy ones!  What are ye about, now?  Gee!”

“Mankind, in Hollingsworth’s opinion,” thought I, “is but another yoke of oxen, as stubborn, stupid, and sluggish as our old Brown and Bright.  He vituperates us aloud, and curses us in his heart, and will begin to prick us with the goad-stick, by and by.  But are we his oxen?  And what right has he to be the driver?  And why, when there is enough else to do, should we waste our strength in dragging home the ponderous load of his philanthropic absurdities?  At my height above the earth, the whole matter looks ridiculous!”

Turning towards the farmhouse, I saw Priscilla (for, though a great way off, the eye of faith assured me that it was she) sitting at Zenobia’s window, and making little purses, I suppose; or, perhaps, mending the Community’s old linen.  A bird flew past my tree; and, as it clove its way onward into the sunny atmosphere, I flung it a message for Priscilla.

“Tell her,” said I, “that her fragile thread of life has inextricably knotted itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it will be broken.  Tell her that Zenobia will not be long her friend.  Say that Hollingsworth’s heart is on fire with his own purpose, but icy for all human affection; and that, if she has given him her love, it is like casting a flower into a sepulchre.  And say that if any mortal really cares for her, it is myself; and not even I for her realities,—­poor little seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her!—­ but for the fancy-work with which I have idly decked her out!”

The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche.  Many trees mingled their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor.  Possibly there was a sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me.  It may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world.  Our especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh aloud.

“But the joke is a little too heavy,” thought I.  “If I were wise, I should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my companions for remaining in it.”

While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in the wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt.  It brought my thoughts back to our recent interview.  I recognized as chiefly due to this man’s influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had filled my mental vision in regard to all life’s better purposes.  And it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the noble earthliness