affairs. How much depends on these little books! Methinks if anything
could draw out my whole strength, it would be the motives that now press
upon me. Yet, after all, I must keep these considerations out of my
mind, because an external pressure always disturbs instead of assisting
me.


Salem, September 3d.--. . . . But really I should judge it to be twenty
years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my
life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one.
It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an
associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there,
sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes,
and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my
name. But this spectre was not myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat
remarkable that my hands have, during the past summer, grown very brown
and rough, insomuch that many people persist in believing that I, after
all, was the aforesaid spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer,
and hay-raker. But such people do not know a reality from a shadow.
Enough of nonsense. I know not exactly how soon I shall return to the
farm. Perhaps not sooner than a fortnight, from to-morrow.


Salem, September 14th.--. . . . Master Cheever is a very good subject for
a sketch, especially if he be portrayed in the very act of executing
judgment on an evildoer. The little urchin may be laid across his knee,
and his arms and legs, and whole person indeed, should be flying all
abroad, in an agony of nervous excitement and corporeal smart. The
Master, on the other hand, must be calm, rigid, without anger or pity,
the very personification of that immitigable law whereby suffering