The plan met with instant approval, and was put into immediate operation. Meadow-Farm began to assume the appearance of a village. Saving a tavern-stand, it had all the appurtenances of one. Work-shops were erected, mills set a-going, and neat cottages peeped from among luxuriant shrubbery in this amphitheatre of hills. The sounds of industry were heard where a few years before all was the unbroken silence of nature; and songs of joy and thanksgiving gushed from many hearts whose youth had been laden with sighs and tears. Successful beyond his hopes, Rufus looked over the whole, and his conscience told him, 'This is my work; under the blessing of heaven my design is answered; truly may we cast our bread upon the waters, and find it after many days.' He felt at the moment that he had paid back to society all that his father had taken from it, and his heart was at peace. But what were his own domestic relations, it may be asked, in this kind of common life? Did not his heart pine for a home of his own? Did he not long for the seclusion, the freedom of a hearth he could call exclusively his own? Did not this constant watchfulness over so many, distract his attention from his wife and children? By no means. The domestic arrangements of the house were such that he could retire and be as solitary as a hermit. No member of the band lost his individuality any more than men do by living in cities and villages. The association and its laws did not merge the domestic relations or destroy the family bond. On the contrary, the father had more time to give to his wife and the education of his children than is usual, because both himself and wife were freed from much of that domestic drudgery which so much occupies the time of the middle ranks of men. Three women, by a judicious distribution of labor, can cook and keep house for thirty persons with more ease and much greater economy than one woman can do all the work for five persons, the average number of households. And if the outlay in conveniences and labor-saving machinery which a large establishment authorizes, be taken into account, this truth becomes still more apparent.