The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 | Page 8

this financial point of view never occurred to me."
The other rose with a look of pity, and led us out through the great
ware-rooms, where their silks and cottons were stored in chests, out to
the stables to inspect stock, and so forth. But before we had proceeded
far, I missed Knowles, who had trotted on before with a stunned air of
perplexity. When I went back to the tavern, late that night, I found him
asleep on the bed, one burly arm around his boy. The next morning he
was up betimes, and at work investigating the real condition of the
Harmonists. They treated him with respect, for, outside of what Josiah
called his vagaries, Knowles was shrewd and honest.
Tony and I wandered about the drowsy village and meadows, looking

at the queer old gardens, dusky with long-forgotten plants, or
sometimes at their gallery of paintings, chief among which was one of
West's larger efforts.
It was not until the close of the second day that Knowles spoke openly
to me. Whatever the disappointment had cost him, he told nothing of
it,--grew graver, perhaps, but discussed the chances in the stock market
with the directors,--ate Christina's suppers, watching the poor withered
women and the gross men with a perplexed look of pity.
"They are but common minds and common bodies, perhaps," he said
one evening, as we sat in our corner, after a long, quiet scrutiny of them:
"in any case, their lives would have been meagre and insignificant, and
yet, Humphreys, yet even that little possibility seems to have been here
palsied and balked. I hope George Rapp cannot look back and see what
his scheme has done for these people."
"You were mistaken in it, then?"
His dark face reddened gloomily. "You see what they are. Yet Rapp,
whatever complaints these people may make of him, I believe to have
been an enthusiast, who sacrificed his property to establish a pure, great
reform in society. But human nature! human nature is as crooked to
drive as a pig tied by a string. Why, these Arcadians, sir, have made a
god of their stomachs, and such of them as have escaped that spend
their lives in amassing dollar after dollar to hoard in their common
chest."
I suggested that Rapp and he left them nothing else to do. "You shut
them out both from a home and from the world; love, ambition, politics,
are dead words to them. What can they do but eat and grub?"
"Think! Go back into Nature's heart, and, with contemplation, bear fruit
of noble thoughts unto eternal life!" But he hesitated; his enthusiasm
hung fire strangely.
After a while,--"Well, well, Zachary," with a laugh, "we'd better go
back into the world, and take up our work again. Josiah is partly right,

may be. There are a thousand fibres of love and trade and mutual help
which bind us to our fellow-man, and if we try to slip out of our place
and loose any of them, our own souls suffer the loss by so much life
withdrawn. It is as well not to live altogether outside of the market;
nor--to escape from this," lifting Tony up on his knee, and beginning a
rough romp with him. But I saw his face work strangely as he threw the
boy up in the air, and when he caught him, he strained him to his burly
breast until the child cried out. "Tut! tut! What now, you young ruffian?
Come, shoes off, and to bed; we'll have a little respite from you. I say,
Humphreys, do you see the hungry look with which the old women
follow the child? God help them! I wonder if it will be made right for
them in another world!" An hour after, I heard him still pacing the floor
up stairs, crooning some old nursery song to put the boy to sleep.
* * * * *
I visited the Harmonists again not many months ago; the village and
orchards lie as sleepily among the quiet hills as ever. There are more
houses closed, more grass on the streets. A few more of the simple,
honest folk have crept into their beds under the apple-trees, from which
they will not rise in the night to eat, or to make money,--Christina
among the rest. I was glad she was gone where it was sunny and bright,
and where she would not have to grow tired for the sight of "a little
shild." There have been but few additions, if any, to the society in the
last twenty years. They still retain the peculiar dress which they wore
when they left Würtemberg: the men wearing the common German
peasant habit; the women, a light, narrow flannel gown, with wide
sleeves and a