This episode is brought to you by Slack. With Slack, you can bring all your people and

tools together in one place. It's your digital HQ where you can increase productivity,

enable flexibility and automate workflows. Plus, Slack is full of game-changing features,

like huddles for quick check-ins or Slack Connect, which helps you connect with partners

inside and outside of your company. Slack. Where the future works, get started at

Slack.com slash DHQ. The Custom House. Part 2. Such were some of the people with whom

I now found myself connected. I took it in good part at the hands of Providence, that

I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits and set myself seriously

to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable

schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm, after living for three years within the

subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's, after those wild, free days on the acypeth

indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen bows with Ellery Channing.

After talking with Therau about pine trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden,

after growing fistidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hilard's culture,

after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's Harstone, it was time at length

that I should exercise other faculties of my nature and nourish myself with food for

which I'd hither too had little appetite. Even the old inspector was desirable as a

change of diet to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an evidence in some measure

of a system naturally well-balanced and lacking no essential part of a Therau organization

that was such associates to remember I could mingle at once with men of all together

different qualities and never murmur at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects were now of little moment in my regard. I cared

...