brethren of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves
into their habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin
the reformation of the world. Zenobia put her head into the entry,
and besought Silas Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough
to leave an armful of firewood and a pail of water at her chamber
door. Of the whole household,--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla,
for whose habits, in this particular, I cannot vouch,--of all our
apostolic society, whose mission was to bless mankind, Hollingsworth,
I apprehend, was the only one who began the enterprise with prayer.
My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned from his, the solemn
murmur of his voice made its way to my ears, compelling me to be an
auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator. It affected me with a
deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing,
or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor my
subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits
(except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly
marked out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the
divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.

As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward,
cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was,
the hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in
which I indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my
physical system; and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together
with the general chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into
my heart and the marrow of my bones. In this predicament, I
seriously wished--selfish as it may appear--that the reformation of
society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events,
to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely