What,  in  the  name  of  common  sense,  had  I  to  do
with  any  better  society  than  I  had  always  lived  in  ?  It
had  satisfied  me  well  enough.  My  pleasant  bachelor-
parlor,  sunny  and  shadowy,  curtained  and  carpeted,  with
the  bed-chamber  adjoining  ;  my  centre-table,  strewn  with
books  and  periodicals  ;  my  writing-desk,  with  a  half-
finished  poem,  in  a  stanza  of  my  own  contrivance ;  my
morning  lounge  at  the  reading-room  or  picture-gallery;
my  noontide  walk  along  the  cheery  pavement,  with  the
suggestive  succession  of  human  faces,  and  the  brisk
throb  of  human  life,  in  which  I  shared ;  my  dinner  at
the  Albion,  where  I  had  a  hundred  dishes  at  command,
and  could  banquet  as  delicately  as  the  wiza;d  Michael
Scott  when  the  devil  fed  him  from  the  King  of  France's
kitchen ;  my  evening  at  the  billiard-club,  the  concert,  the
4


50  THE    BLITHfiDALE    30MANCB

theatre,  or  at  somebody's  party,  if  I  pleased ;  —  what
could  be  better  than  all  this  ?  Was  it  better  to  hce,  to
mow,  to  toil  and  moil  amidst  the  accumulations  of  a
Dam-yard ;  tc  be  tht  chamber-maid  of  two  yoke  of  oxen
and  a  dozen  cows ;  to  eat  salt  beef,  and^earn  it  with  the
sweat  of  my  brow,  and  thereby  take  the  tough  morsei
out  of  some  wretch's  mouth,  into  whose  vocation  I  hart
thrust  myself?  Above  all,  was  it  better  to  have  a  fever
and  die  blaspheming,  as  I  was  like  to  do  ?

In  this  wretched  plight,  with  a  furnace  in  my  heart,
and  another  in  my  head,  by  the  heat  of  which  I  was
kept  constantly  at  the  boiling  point,  yet  shivering  at  the
bare  idea  of  extruding  so  much  as  a  finger  into  the  icy
atmosphere  of  the  room,  I  kept  my  bed  until  breakfast-
time,  when  Hollingsworth  knocked  at  the  door,  and
entered.
