To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as 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 offence 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.
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.