ent. But it is late. Will you tell me what I
can do for you?"

"Please to excuse me to-night, Mr. Coverdale," said Moodie. "You are
very kind; but I am afraid I have troubled you, when, after all, there
may be no need. Perhaps, with your good leave, I will come to your
lodgings to-morrow morning, before you set out for Blithedale. I wish
you a good-night, sir, and beg pardon for stopping you."

And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next morning,
it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a
plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been. Arriving
at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a
cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to
the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident as at some
former periods that this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably
with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could possibly be
taken. It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed, after
drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride
myself in those days. It was the very last bottle; and I finished it,
with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.

II. BLITHEDALE

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty
bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache),
there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as
that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood
fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but
with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.
Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes
from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of
more inspiring breath. Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the
dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for my
finger-ends! The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out. Their
genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric
glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from damp
fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer through a
forest. Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us might sit
on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary
warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of
Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed!