What on earth do you want
more? But go along! I understand the business. We shall never see
your face here again. Here ends the reformation of the world, so far
as Miles Coverdale has a hand in it!"
"By no means," I replied. "I am resolute to die in the last ditch,
for the good of the cause."
"Die in a ditch!" muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee
intolerance of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth
of July, the autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,--
"die in a ditch! I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there
were no steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it!"
The truth was, that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had
come over me. Blithedale was no longer what it had been. Everything
was suddenly faded. The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and
pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the
lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had
blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and
shadiest of my contemplative
recesses. The change will be recognized by many, who, after a period
of happiness, have endeavored to go on with the same kind of life, in
the same scene, in spite of the alteration or withdrawal of some
principal circumstance. They discover (what heretofore, perhaps,
they had not known) that it was this which gave the bright color and
vivid reality to the whole affair.
I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but
with Zenobia and Priscilla.
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