He returned to college in the spring of 1841, but his eyes would stand no more. He was about to find work as an agricultural labourer when Brook Farm attracted him. Through George Ripley he was admitted to that association, which sought to combine labour and intellect in a beautiful communistic scheme. He agreed to teach Greek and German and to help with the farm work. Dana subscribed for three of the thirty shares--at five hundred dollars a share--of the stock of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, as the company was legally titled. Brook Farm was a fine place of a hundred and ninety-two acres, in the town of Roxbury, about nine miles from Boston. It cost $10,500 and, as most of the shareholders had no money to pay on their stock, mortgages amounting to eleven thousand dollars were immediately clapped on the place--a feat rare in the business world, at once to mortgage a place for more than its cost. Dana, now twenty-three years old, was elected recording secretary, one of the three trustees, and a member of the committees on finance and education. He remained as a Brook Farmer to the end of the five years that the experiment lasted. There he met Hawthorne, who lingered long enough to get much of the material for his “Blithedale Romance”; Thoreau, who had not yet gone to Walden Pond; William Ellery Channing, second, the author and journalist; Albert Brisbane, the most radical of the group of socialists of his day; and Margaret Fuller, who believed in Brook Farm, but did not live there. Brook Farm was the perfect democracy. The members did all the work, menial and otherwise, and if there was honour it fell to him whose task was humblest. The community paid each worker a dollar a day, and charged him or her about two dollars and fifty cents a week for board. It sold its surplus produce, and it educated children at low rates. George Ripley, the Unitarian minister, was chief of the cow-milking group, and Dana helped him. Dana, as head waiter, served food to John Cheever, valet to an English baronet then staying in Boston. “And it was great fun,” Dana said, in a lecture delivered at the University of Michigan forty years afterward. “There were seventy people or more, and at dinner they all came in and we served them. There was more entertainment in doing the duty than in getting away from it.” It was at Brook Farm that Dana first made the acquaintance of Horace Greeley, who, himself a student of Fourier, was interested in the Roxbury experiment, so much more idealistic than Fourierism itself.