Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him

on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the

subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and

examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.

The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our

infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more

difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was

neither good nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of

the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the

aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local

appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and

interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of

very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested "Sunny

Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better system of society.

This we turned over and over for a while, acknowledging its prettiness,

but concluded it to be rather too fine and sentimental a name (a fault

inevitable by literary ladies in such attempts) for sunburnt men to

work under. I ventured to whisper "Utopia," which, however, was

unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly maltreated, as

if he had intended a latent satire. Some were for calling our

institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one green spot in the

moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted on a proviso for

reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end, when a final decision

might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or "Sahara." So, at last,

finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we resolved

that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good augury

enough.

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through

the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state 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, broad,

bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can. I shall sound the

horn at daybreak; and we've got 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. The night proved a feverish one. During the

greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea

remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable

other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant

transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that

night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have

anticipated several of the chief incidents of this narrative, including

a dim shadow of its catastrophe. Starting up in bed at length, I saw

that the storm was past, and the moon was shining on the snowy

landscape, which looked like a lifeless copy of the world in marble.




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