looked very much discomposed.

"I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!" she said rather
petulantly. "How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady
merely by holding her letter in my hand?"

"Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it," I replied;
"nor do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it. It was
just a coincidence, nothing more."

She hastened out of the room, and this was the last that I saw of
Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.

Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr.
Emerson's Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances
(lent me by Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the
brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little else,
most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel,
whose station was on the outposts of the advance guard of human
progression; or sometimes the voice came sadly from among the shattered
ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future. They were
well adapted (better, at least, than any other intellectual products,
the volatile essence of which had heretofore tinctured a printed page)
to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably
further into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had
ever marched before. Fourier's works, also, in a series of horribly
tedious volumes, attracted a good deal of my attention, from the
analogy which I could not but recognize between his system and our own.
There was far less resemblance, it is true, than the world chose to
imagine, inasmuch as the two theories differed, as widely as the zenith
from the nadir, in their main principles.

I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his
benefit, some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.

"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe shall
arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into
a particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in
Fourier's time. He calls it limonade a cedre. It is positively a
fact! Just imagine the city docks filled, every day, with a flood tide
of this delectable beverage!"

"Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it at once?" asked
Hollingsworth. "The jack-tars would be delighted to go down in ships
and do business in such an element."

I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly could, several