beginning of this chapter. There we sat, with the snow melting out
of our hair and beards, and our faces all ablaze, what with the past
inclemency and present warmth. It was, indeed, a right good fire
that we found awaiting us, built up of great, rough logs, and knotty
limbs, and splintered fragments of an oak-tree, such as farmers are
wont to keep for their own hearths, since these crooked and
unmanageable boughs could never be measured into merchantable cords
for the market. A family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their
kettle over precisely such a fire as this, only, no doubt, a bigger
one; and, contrasting it with my coal-grate, I felt so much the more
that we had transported ourselves a world-wide distance from the
system of society that shackled us at breakfast-time.

Good, comfortable Mrs. Foster (the wife of stout Silas Foster, who
was to manage the farm at a fair stipend, and be our tutor in the art
of husbandry) bade us a hearty welcome. At her back--a back of
generous breadth--appeared two young women, smiling most hospitably,
but looking rather awkward withal, as not well knowing what was to be
their position in our new arrangement of the world. We shook hands
affectionately all round, and congratulated ourselves that the
blessed state of brotherhood and sisterhood, at which we aimed, might
fairly be dated from this moment. Our greetings were hardly
concluded when the door opened, and Zenobia--whom I had never before
seen, important as was her place in our enterprise--Zenobia entered
the parlor.

This (as the reader, if at all acquainted with our literary biography,
need scarcely be told) was not her real name. She had assumed it,
in the first instance, as her magazine signature; and, as it accorded
well with something imperial which her friends attributed to this