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 di