It was intimated that the Brook Farm experiment had better stop, and that all the material that was good should be transferred to the North American. But it is easily seen that this was impossible, and that the experiment must go on. The leaders and members had pledged themselves too faithfully to carry out the Association's ideas, and none among them would be bold enough to announce such a project. It would seem like selling out to another organization. Who would dare to propose to break into the charmed circle by such discordant words? And so it went on. Much talent was used in the school. As the Association took to itself a variety of industries; as it added shoemakers, carpenters and farmers to its original stock of intellectual workers, a change took place in the selectness of its society. Although the members were chosen by the organization, yet "practical" farmers, and "practical" shoemakers, with their wives and children, are not supposed to have the easy grace of manners, the elegant language and the fluency and charm of cultivated and scholarly men and women. The little, scarcely organized Community had increased into a goodly number, so that its dining room was like a small hotel; and it was no longer held by the "Transcendentalists," but had become a portion of a large and increasing body of men who followed the wild ideas of a Frenchman named Fourier, and called itself the Brook Farm Phalanx. And who was this Fourier? It was just at this time; it was just as this question was asked by anxious mothers, that the slanders of the New York Press, copied into other papers, far and wide, worked mischief to the Brook Farm School. I never knew a pupil who was not pleased and delighted with the school; but the mother who sends a child away from home to an educational institution, especially if the child is a girl, will send it where there are no intimations connected with it of the character of those brought so prominently forward by the New York newspapers. It matters not so much to her that she believes the stories are slanders; her duty seems plain to take no risks. The "Association" or "Phalanx" now overlapped the school, and it could no longer have the prominence as an industry that it did at first. The school, from being so intimately connected with the Association, began to lose caste. Although conducted with as much talent as ever, and with as much devotion on the part of its teachers, from the fact of the unfortunate odium cast on it, and its peculiar surroundings, was declining, and the high talent, the culture and the knowledge of its teachers, could not retain it in its proud position. Thus I have gathered together, as in a bouquet, the sources of all the income of the once famous "Brook Farm." How slight they were!