It was, as above said, after one of his visits to Boston that my father came home with the suggestion of sending Althea and myself to school at Brook Farm. The idea met with a good deal of opposition from the Dutch side of the house, which was my side for all I was worth, but I suppose father opined that it was time some of the provincialism of the Old Colonie should be rubbed off. Through his acquaintance with Thurlow Weed he came to know Mr. Greeley and through Mr. Greeley was introduced to Dr. Ripley and the Transcendentalists, gaining, by the way, broader views and a wider range of ideas than those which had prevailed in Beaver Street for two hundred years. Such, I take it was the sequence of events, not as noted by a little boy but as partly imagined and partly reasoned out at a later time. Partly imagined, too, is the presumption that my father was attracted by the philosophic ideals presented by his Boston friends. A tired business man might well be impressed by the Transcendental teaching that our civilization has gone wrong in forcing all human energy into the one pursuit, that of getting riches. They held that while hard work rarely harms any one, the monotonous grind in the money making mills results in arrested development. Work as hard as you please, spend all the energy, all the talent, all the skill you have but not in seeking wealth. That is not worth while, and it prevents the doing of what is worth while. Do your best in the world; give all you can, but be sure to get a fair return, not in money but in better things. Seek culture, seek knowledge, seek character, seek friendship, good will, good health, good conscience, and the peace that passeth understanding shall be added unto you. Be content with a small measure of this world’s wealth and do not crave costly luxuries to make a show withal. To this end, go out into the country; raise what you need as far as possible with your own hands, and enough more to exchange for such things as you cannot produce. Abandon the world, the flesh and the Devil and go back to the soil and find the Garden of Eden. My father accepted these teachings in good faith and gave in his testimony with those who in _The Dial_ and through other agencies were propagating the new philosophy. His engagements with others were such that he could not break away at the time to put these novel ideas to the test of actual experiment but no doubt he thought it wise and well to give his children an early initiation into the new life that was to regenerate the world.