the call.

We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly
said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed.
Then, indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his
meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply
possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the
intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the
infrequent sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a
circumstance that seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence
that he awarded to them. His heart, I imagine, was never really
interested in our socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his
strange, and, as most people thought it, impracticable plan, for the
reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts.

Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate
him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of
the subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and
examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.

The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our
infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more
difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was
neither good nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of
the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the
aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local
appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and
interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of
very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested "Sunny