against the black panes of our uncurtained
windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the
narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements
glimmering across the street. The house probably seemed to her adrift
on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all
that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness
that really exists in its limitless extent. Once, while the blast was
bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of
one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably
reluctant to obey the call.

We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly said
a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then,
indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his
meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply
possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the
intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent
sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a circumstance that
seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence that he awarded to
them. His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our
socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most
people thought it, impracticable plan, for the reformation of criminals
through an appeal to their higher instincts.

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