to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told
slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to
drive them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their
conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too, that the
cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked
over the pails; partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the
wrong side, and partly because, taking offense at the whisking of
their tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural
fly-flappers with one hand, and milking with the other. They further
averred that we hoed up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops,
and drew the earth carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five
hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for cabbages; and that, by
dint of unskilful planting, few of our seeds ever came up at all, or,
if they did come up, it was stern-foremost; and that we spent the
better part of the month of June in reversing a field of beans, which
had thrust themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way. They
quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or other
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.

IV

THE DEATH OF JUDGE PYNCHEON[79]

Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid,
and singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent.
Fainter and fainter grows the light. It is as if another
double-handful of darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it
is no longer gray, but sable. There is still a faint appearance at
the window; neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer--any phrase of
light w