hand the cream, and others help
me to the bread and butter. Being one of them again, the knowledge of
what had happened would come to me without a shock. For still, at
every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face
that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.

Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the woods,
resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily as the
wild Indian before he makes his onset. I would go wandering about the
outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary
acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of the trees (a
kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant, like myself),
and entreat him to tell me how all things were.

The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up
beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who
chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough. I trod along by the
dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one of
its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the barkless
stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting itself to my
fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was, and if any
overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and
if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the
skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth,
clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old
despair. So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that
I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks, which
were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each a bright
streak over the black surface. By and by, I came to my hermitage, in
the heart of the white-pine tree, and clambering up into it, sat down
to rest. The grapes, which I had watched throughout the summer, now
dangled around me in abundant clusters of the deepest purple,
deliciously sweet to the taste, and, though wild, yet free from that
ungentle flavor which distinguishes nearly all our native and
uncultivated grapes. Methought a wine might be pressed out of them
possessing a passionate zest, and endowed with a new kind of
intoxicating quality, attended with such bacchanalian ecstasies as the
tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and the Rhine are inadequate to
produce. And I longed to quaff a great gobl