Only that morning, Father George Rapp, the chief man of the town of Harmony, had said to his boy guest, "Better mix up wet clay with grass, Doby, and chink the hole by your bed, or some wild creature will come along and nip your nose while you are asleep."
At the moment of Father Rapp's command, Doby had been busy. Everybody in Harmony always was busy. The industry of the settlement was epidemic. Even growing boys caught it.
The Harmonists worked early and late. Their clean, blue, homespun-covered figures moved sedately through their gardens, fields and dairies, through their cocoonery and silk-factory, through their brickyard and woolen and oil mills. They toiled without hurry and without useless motions to the time of their own singing or to the music of their little German band.
Even the dogs climbed into the treadmills to do a daily task of turning the smaller machines.
Nothing was bought which they could possibly make themselves. All their surplus goods were sold to outside settlers. Thus, by never taking anything out of their treasury and by always putting something into it, they became so very rich that in 1825, ten years from the time they founded their settlement, Robert Dale Owen, a social experimenter, was glad to buy the town because it seemed to offer such a promise of prosperity to the communistic colony which he himself wanted to establish there.
After a few hours with the strong-willed Father Rapp, who kept the colony going so successfully, Doby had found himself as busy as the other Harmonists. As soon as it was suggested to him, he went to work driving half a dozen pegs into the wall between the logs, and on them laying a board which he had helped split from an oak-tree. He had been obliged to pick up his shavings and his scraps. No carpenter's litter was allowed to mar the perfect neatness and order of the spotless town.
In trying to live up to this high standard of tidiness, Doby had forgotten to daub the fresh clay over the place where his pounding had jarred the chinking out.
He had been proud of his work, for that board on its pegs formed his bed. It was such a comfortable bed with its homespun tick filled with leaves and its patchwork quilt on top.
Now on this very first night he was driven from it by a bear.