Wednesday and Thursday of that first week at Brook Farm were sad days indeed. I made a bad beginning! Shut up indoors by the most violent tempest of the year, I sulked in corners, alone in a crowd, the loneliest kind of solitude. The teachers did their best to keep classes going in the bedrooms, but, in the irregularity of the sessions, I was allowed to be absent without remark. Althea and some others tried to draw me into the continuous picnic performance going on all over the house only to learn there was nothing doing in brother’s retreat. At meal time the exasperating brown bread was invariably offered for my delectation, and that I regarded as a personal affront. Resorting to alliteration’s artful aid, it may be said I seemed bound to be bothered by Boston brown bread. I brooded morning, noon and night over the one idea that when my father came, I would beseech him to take me back home.
It appeared, later, that I was not being altogether neglected by the authorities during this trying period, as they had kept their eyes on the new boy and were seriously considering this same idea, thinking it would perhaps be better to advise his father to take him away. The dour youker was plainly enough so unhappily out of place that they were inclined not to try to keep him. Truly, a bad beginning!
This was not a decision adopted to meet the special case in hand, but rather an unwritten rule of the community. Brook Farm was a solidarity, a company united to put in practice certain principles and to accomplish certain results, and only those were wanted who could enter into the spirit of the movement and aid in carrying on the great work. Those who did not help, hindered, and to hinder the task of reforming society could not be permitted. As with the community, so also with the school. The school was an independent organization, but it was likewise an experimental organization, being, practically, a first attempt to inaugurate industrial education, and only pupils suited for such an education were wanted. It was not a place for the feeble-minded, the deficient or the intractable, but for bright children capable of responding to instruction directed to certain ends. The teachers, earnestly devoted to these selected courses of instruction, could not afford to give time and attention to incompetents.
These matters are worth mentioning for the reason that Brook Farm in general and Dr. Ripley in particular have been censured for refusing to accept members of the community and pupils of the school not suited to the forwarding of undertakings held as almost sacred. This exclusiveness was neither hard-hearted nor uncharitable, but was simply necessary under the circumstances. To charge Brook Farm with being heathenish and unchristian on this account, as certain Puritan critics have done, is as unjust as it would be to blame Luther Burbank for discarding a thousand plants to cultivate the one growth giving promise of answering his purpose. For any experiment the careful selection of material is not only proper but indispensable.
On Friday the storm abated and things began to mend all around as the sides cleared. In the afternoon Dr. Ripley and Charles Hosmer made their way home from Boston, hailed with rejoicings by everyone except Master Grumpus, who should have been more than thankful for their timely arrival, had he only known it. Saturday morning regular lessons were resumed in the classroom, but I held aloof in out-of-the-way coverts; one hiding place being the cow-stable. Here Charles Hosmer happened to find me, just incidentally, as it seemed, but really by kindly design no doubt, and gave me a hearty greeting which I couldn’t be so churlish as not to return.
“Are you the boy who came from Albany?” he asked.
“From the Old Colonie, in Albany,” I replied.
“I suppose,” he continued, “you have not yet been assigned to your classes?”
I accepted this account of what was in fact absence without leave, and he then suggested that if I had nothing else on hand I might help him in making a toboggan-slide. Never having heard of such a thing I accepted the invitation. Securing a couple of shovels we cleared a path to the knoll; and, on the way, Mr. Hosmer explained that Angus Cameron, another new pupil, hailing from Canada, had brought to the school a toboggan, a kind of sled, and we were to make a smooth path or slide for it, so the boys and girls could try it in the afternoon when there were no lessons.
We went to work with a will, spanking the snow down with the shovels, leveling uneven places and forming a clear, hard track from the top of the Knoll to the brook. On the edge of the bank we piled up an inclined plane, wetting down the snow and building a mound perhaps five feet high. From this elevation, Mr. Hosmer stated, the toboggan, flying down the slide, would shoot upward and forward and land on the far side of the brook. That seemed to me a very desirable thing to do, and, while I finished up the shovel-work, my companion went back to the Hive and brought out the toboggan.