each of us her hand, which was very soft and warm. She had something appropriate to say to every individual. . .

"I am the first comer," Zenobia went on to say, while her smile beamed warmth upon us all; "so I take the part of hostess for to-day, and welcome you as if to my own fireside. You shall be my guests, too, at supper. To-morrow, if you please, we will be brethren and sisters, and begin our new life from day-break."

"Have we our various parts assigned?" asked some

one.

"Oh, we of the softer sex," responded Zenobia, with her mellow, almost broad laugh, "we women (there are four of us here already), will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a matter of course. To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew; to wash, and iron, and scrub, and sweep, and at our idle intervals, to repose ourselves on knitting and sewing-these, I suppose, must be feminine occupations for the present. By-and-by, perhaps, when our individual adaptations begin to develop themselves, it may be that some of us who wear the petticoat will go a-field, and leave the weaker brethren to take our place in the kitchen."

"What a pity," I remarked, "that the kitchen, and the house-work generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes. to mend, and no washing-day."

"I am afraid," said Zenobia, with mirth gleaming out of her eyes, "we shall find some difficulty in adopting the Paradisaical system for at least a month to come. Look at that snow-drift sweeping past the window! Are there any figs ripe, do you think? Have the pineapples been gathered to-day? Would you like a breadfruit, or a cocoanut? Shall I run out and pluck you some roses? No, no, Mr. Coverdale; the only flower hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got out of a greenhouse this morning. And as for the garb of Eden," added she, shivering playfully, "I shall not assume it till after May-day!

"And now," continued Zenobia, "I must go and help get supper. Do you think you can be content, instead of figs, pineapples, and all the delicacies of Adam's supper-table, with tea and toast, and a certain modest sup

ply of ham and tongue which, with the instinct of a housewife, I brought hither in a basket? And there shall be bread and milk, too, if the innocence of your taste demands it."

The whole sisterhood now went about their domestic avocations, utterly declining our offers to assist, further than by bringing wood for the kitchen fire from a huge pile in the back yard. Soon with a tremendous stamping in the entry, appeared Silas Foster, lanky, stalwart, uncouth, and grisly-bearded. He came from foddering the cattle in the barn, and from the field where he had been ploughing until the depth of snow rendered it impossible to draw a furrow. He greeted us in pretty much the same tone as if he were speaking to his oxen, took a quid from his iron tobacco-box, pulled off his wet cowhide boots, and sat down before the fire in his stocking feet. The steam arose from his soaked garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectrelike.

"Well, folk," remarked Silas," you'll be wishing yourselves back to town again, if this weather holds."

And true enough, there was a look of gloom as the twilight fell silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes intermingling themselves with the fastdescending snow. But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. We had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary tread-mill of established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stept down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen, we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false. and cruel principles on which human society has all along been based.

And, first of all, we had divorced ourselves from

pride, and were striving to supply its place by familiar love. We meant to lessen the laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share of it at the cost of our own thews and sinews. We sought our profit by mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy, or filching it craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves (if indeed, there were any such in New England), or winning it by selfish competition with a neighbor; in one or another of which fashions every son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil, whether he chooses or no. And, as the basis of our institution, we proposed to offer up the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no less than an effort for the advancement of our race. Therefore if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to wrack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I rejoice that I once could think better of the world's improbability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error. Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation ; but when he did speak, it was very much to some practical purpose. For instance :—

"Which man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of swine? Some of us must go to the next Brighton Fair, and buy half-a-dozen pigs."

Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from 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-garden. ing," 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 you 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 marketgardeners 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 benefitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded one's 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. . .

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another stage of existence close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By-and-by the door was opened by Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow candle in his hand.

"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you

can. I shall sound the horn at daybreak; and we've got to get the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to milk, and a dozen other things to do before breakfast."

Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been growing upon me for several hours past) that, I had caught a tremendous cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit subject for a hospital. How cold an Arcadia was this.-The Blithedale Romance.

THE REVEREND ARTHUR DIMMESDALE.

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale recalled and more and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester Prynne and himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England, or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam or the few settlements of Europeans, scattered thinly along the seaboard. Hester could take it upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child, with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would be on the fourth day from the present. "That is most fortunate," he had said to himself. The reason why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate was because on the third day from the present he was to preach the Election Sermon; and as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his official career. "At least, they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no public duty unperformed nor ill performed!" Sad indeed that introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and still may have worse things to tell of him;