ther of us to crop off two or
three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter.
Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues
circulated a report that we communitarians were exterminated, to the
last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own
scythes! and that the world had lost nothing by this little accident.

But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring
farmers. The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail
in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease
to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had
pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of
labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.
Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom,
heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind
exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and
catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view,
matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. It is very
true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my
toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene
of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted
aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and
seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and
assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals.
But this was all. The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored
and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our
thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor
symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the
evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of
bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of
finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and
integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or
welded into one substance.

Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as
Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.

"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the
hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."

"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positivel