efore we had proceeded
far, I missed Knowles, who had trotted on before with a stunned air of
perplexity. When I went back to the tavern, late that night, I found him
asleep on the bed, one burly arm around his boy. The next morning he was
up betimes, and at work investigating the real condition of the
Harmonists. They treated him with respect, for, outside of what Josiah
called his vagaries, Knowles was shrewd and honest.

Tony and I wandered about the drowsy village and meadows, looking at the
queer old gardens, dusky with long-forgotten plants, or sometimes at
their gallery of paintings, chief among which was one of West's larger
efforts.

It was not until the close of the second day that Knowles spoke openly
to me. Whatever the disappointment had cost him, he told nothing of
it,--grew graver, perhaps, but discussed the chances in the stock market
with the directors,--ate Christina's suppers, watching the poor withered
women and the gross men with a perplexed look of pity.

"They are but common minds and common bodies, perhaps," he said one
evening, as we sat in our corner, after a long, quiet scrutiny of them:
"in any case, their lives would have been meagre and insignificant, and
yet, Humphreys, yet even that little possibility seems to have been here
palsied and balked. I hope George Rapp cannot look back and see what his
scheme has done for these people."

"You were mistaken in it, then?"

His dark face reddened gloomily. "You see what they are. Yet Rapp,
whatever complaints these people may make of him, I believe to have been
an enthusiast, who sacrificed his property to establish a pure, great
reform in society. But human nature! human nature is as crooked to drive
as a pig tied by a string. Why, these Arcadians, sir, have made a god of
their stomachs, and such of them as have escaped that spend their lives
in amassing dollar after dollar to hoard in their common chest."

I suggested that Rapp and he left them nothing else to do. "You shut
them out both from a home and from the world; love, ambition, politics,
are dead words to them. What can they do but eat and grub?"

"Think! Go back into Nature's heart, and, with contemplation, bear fruit
of noble thoughts unto eternal life!" But he hesitated; his enthusiasm
hung fire strangely.

After a while,--"Well, well, Zachary," with a laugh, "we'd better go
back into the world, and take up our work again. Josiah is partly right,
may be. There are a thousand f