When it was actually in their hands they found that they knew nothing of farming—­and besides, were making money at trades they did not really care to abandon.  They engaged a man to work the farm for them:  and then another.  They were told that the land they had chosen was—­for farming purposes—­worthless.  Their capital ran short; and they tried to make money by keeping a tea-garden.  The original proposer of the scheme wrote to Ruskin, who sent L100:—­the others returned the money.  Ruskin declined to take it back, and began to perceive that the Communists were trifling.  They had made no attempt to found the sort of community they had talked about; neither their plans nor his were being carried out.  So when the original proposer and a friend of his named Riley approached Ruskin again, they found little difficulty in persuading him to try them as managers.  The rest, finding themselves turned out by Riley, vainly demanded “explanations” from Ruskin, who then was drifting into his first attack of brain fever.  So they declined further connection with the farm; the Guild accepted their resignation, and undertook for the time nothing more than to get the land into good condition again.

This was not the only land held by the St. George’s Guild.  It acquired the acre of ground on which the Sheffield Museum stood, and a cottage with a couple of acres near Scarborough.  Two acres of rock and moor at Barmouth had been given by Mrs. Talbot in 1872; and in 1877 Mr. George Baker, then Mayor of Birmingham, gave twenty acres of woodland at Bewdley in Worcestershire, to which at one time Mr. Ruskin thought of moving the museum, before the present building was found for it by the Sheffield Corporation at Meersbrook Park.  On the resignation of the original Trustees, in 1877, Mr. Q. Talbot and Mr. Baker were offered the trust:  and on the death of Mr. Talbot the trust was accepted by Mr. John Henry Chamberlain.  After he died it was taken by Mr. George Thomson of Huddersfield, whose woollen mills, transformed into a co-operative concern, though not directly in connection with the Guild, have given a widely known example of the working of principles advocated in “Fors.”

In the middle of 1876, Egbert Rydings, the auditor of the accounts which, in accordance with his principles of “glass pockets,” Ruskin published in “Fors,” proposed to start a homespun woollen industry at Laxey, in the Isle of Man, where the old women who formerly spun with the wheel had been driven by failure of custom to work in the mines.  The Guild built him a water mill, and in a few years the demand for a pure, rough, durable cloth, created by this and kindred attempts, justified the enterprise.  Ruskin set the example, and had his own grey clothes made of Laxey stuffs—­whose chief drawback was that they never wore out.  A little later a similar work was done, with even greater success, by Mr. Albert Fleming, another member of the Guild; who introduced old-fashioned spinning and hand-loom weaving at Langdale.