There was, we learn here, a charming happy-go-luckiness about the whole life. Partly from necessity, partly from choice, the young people used to sit on the stairs and on the floor during the evening entertainments. Dishes were washed and wiped to the tune of "Oh, Canaan, Bright Canaan," or some other song of the time. When about their work the women wore short skirts with knickerbockers; the water-cure and the starving-cure both received due attention at the hands of some of the members of the household; at table the customary formula was, "Is the butter within the sphere of your influence?" And very often the day's work ended in a dance, a walk to Eliot's Pulpit, or a moonlight hour on the Charles!
During the earlier years the men, who were in excess of the young women in point of numbers, helped very largely in the household labours. George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles Dana, who afterward founded the _New York Sun_, organised a band of griddle-cake servitors composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the Community!" One legend, which has the air of probability, records that a student confessed his passion while helping his sweetheart at the sink. Of love there was indeed not a little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to have made much havoc in the Community, and though very little mismating is to be traced to the intimacy of the life there, fourteen marriages have been attributed to friendships begun at Brook Farm, and there was even one wedding there, that of John Orvis to John Dwight's sister, Marianne. At this simple ceremony William Henry Channing was the minister, and John Dwight made a speech of exactly five words.
Starting with about fifteen persons, the numbers at the farm increased rapidly, though never above one hundred and twenty people were there at a time. It is estimated, however, that about two hundred individuals were connected with the Community from first to last. Of these all the well-known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, one is to count among the "Farmers" Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very young girl was a teacher in the infant department of the school.
Yet though the Farmers have almost all passed beyond, delicious anecdotes about them are all the time coming to light. There is one story of "Sam" Larned which is almost too good to be true. Larned, it is said, steadily refused to drink milk on the ground that his relations with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves, and when it was pointed out to him that he ought on the same principle to abandon shoes, he is said to have made a serious attempt to discover some more moral type of footwear.