wild geese which he had discovered early in the morning marching through
the cornfield. He said they looked exactly like tame geese, but as soon
as he came in sight of them they flew away in a most surprising manner.
Mr. Bradford, who is frequently mentioned in Hawthorne's note-book,
looked sunburnt and very thin, and averred that milking the cows on a
frosty morning was a chilly kind of business. Hawthorne himself had gone
to Boston; probably to sell the pig referred to in his conversation with
Franklin Pierce. The visitors walked about the premises and were shown
through the "Hive," but found it rather a dreary and comfortless
building. The farm did not appear to be well kept. There was too
evidently a lack of order and discipline there; and without order and
discipline no enterprise in which numbers are concerned can succeed.

Having discovered nothing better than fool's gold at Brook Farm,
Hawthorne suddenly came across the true metal in the domestic privacy
of his married life at Concord. It would appear from one of Mrs.
Hawthorne's letters that George Ripley was so sanguine of the success of
his experiment that he had given Hawthorne a sort of guarantee for the
thousand dollars which the latter had invested in it. When, at the close
of the first year, Hawthorne had decided to withdraw from the
association, he naturally hoped to regain a portion of his capital. Mr.
Ripley was too deeply involved to accommodate him in that way, and
offered instead the rent of the old Ripley mansion in Concord, which
then happened to be vacant. So Hawthorne and Miss Peabody were happily
married, with no immediate fund save the rent of an ancient house in the
country, and no better expectations than the uncertain income from his
pen.

It was a hazardous undertaking, but he was now nearly forty years old,
his _fiancee_ more than thirty, nor could the sharpest foresight