"My Dear Sir: It is quite time that I made an answer to your proposition that I should venture into your new community. The design appears to me noble and generous, proceeding as I plainly see, from nothing covert or selfish or ambitious, but from a manly heart and mind. So it makes all men its friends and debtors. It becomes a matter to entertain it in a friendly spirit, and examine what it has for us. "I have decided not to join it, yet very slowly, and I may almost say with penitence. I am greatly relieved by learning that your coadjutors are now so many that you will no longer attach that importance to the defection of individuals which you hinted, in your letter to me, I or others might possess--the painful power, I mean, of preventing the execution of the plan." * * * * * Rev. Theodore Parker, the noted liberal Unitarian preacher, of whose close personal relations with Mr. Ripley much might be said, lived two miles away, at West Roxbury, where he preached in the village church, and his afternoon walk every few days was over to the Farm and back for exercise, and to meet and converse with Mr. Ripley at the Eyry. At the close of their chat you would see them coming down the hill together towards the barn, where Mr. Ripley's duties as milkman took him at that time of day, when they would part--Mr. Parker for his long walk home. One afternoon they were seen as usual coming down the hill. Theodore Parker had not then become famous, but preached in a little square, wooden church, to his small country congregation, and once on a time, being on a visit to a friend at a distance (we will call the friend's name Smith, for convenience sake), Mr. Smith asked Mr. Parker how Mr. Ripley was getting along with his "Community." "Oh," said the faithless Parker, "Mr. Ripley reminds me, in that connection, of a new and splendid locomotive dragging along a train of mud-cars." Soon after Mr. Ripley heard what Mr. Parker had said of him, and resolved to pay him in his own coin. So he held him that day in pleasant, lively conversation until he reached the farmyard by the barn at the Hive, and the unsprung joke was running all around the pleasant lines of his face and twinkling in the corners of his brilliant eyes. Towards the close of the conversation, as Mr. Parker was about to leave, Mr. Ripley casually said that he had met Mr. Smith, and he had spoken of Mr. Parker and his church. "Indeed," said Mr. Parker, "and what did he say of me?" "Well, if you must know," Mr. Ripley replied, "he said that you and your little country church over there in West Roxbury, with its few dozen of farmers, reminded him of a new and splendid locomotive dragging along a train of mud-cars." It would have been worth a month of an ordinary lifetime to be there when Mr. Ripley exploded his joke, to hear his merry peal of laughter, whilst his sides shook again, and his reverend friend stood confounded.