Chapter XL (5)

“That’s the way Mr. Priddy says you ought to iron!” she shouted, her burly face reddening with merriment, as she noticed my chagrin. “It’s backwards and not forwards that you should iron, all of ye!” and then she sat down on a bench in the midst of a most industrious crowd of laughing boys and girls. After the fun, she took the iron in hand in an endeavor to show me the true, laundry method of using a flat-iron.

All the tricks, the horse-plays, the trivial but welcome expressions of fun that crowd themselves into a college life, were indulged at the hotel by the waiters and waitresses. A group of Michigan students lived in a long, loosely-built shanty in the yard, on the doors of which they had painted its name: “Lover’s Roost,” and the better to carry out the fancy of its being a roost, the boys were in the habit of receiving expected visitors, who came to inspect their quarters, perched on the upper beams, above the partitions, flapping their hands and crowing like lusty, gigantic roosters!

The season rushed past in its merry whirl. Tired muscles relaxed, taut nerves slacked, weary bodies gained repose, there on the sand dunes, amid parties, fêtes, musicales, and picnics. The first chill winds from the lake wafted hordes of people back to work, and soon left the hotel nearly unpeopled.

As the day approached when I should have to leave, I found that I had saved but a trifle out of my earnings: the money had gone for a much-needed, but not expensive, ward-robe. I counted over my change and found that I did not have enough money left with which to purchase a ticket for so far away a place as Massachusetts. I mentioned the matter to Thropper. He, in turn, in that generous way of his, began to plan for me. One day he came and said:

“Priddy, you know Gloomer, the fellow from Indiana State University; well, if you go down to Indianapolis with him, he’ll see that you get a chance to go on a freight train as far as New York; from there you’ll have enough to get home, won’t you?”

“Yes. A freight train, you say? As a tramp, riding on the axles?” I gasped, with an inward shudder at the thought of such a desperate ride.

“Of course not!” declared Thropper. “You’d go in the caboose. We’d send you with a load of horses, you know. You’d be the man in charge; to feed them.”

“But I don’t know anything about horses, Thropper.”

“You don’t have to know anything about them,” he said, with a smile. “It’s just a technical way of expressing it. You see, when the horse-dealers send a carload of horses East, they are entitled to a representative to go along and take care of them. You’d be the representative. Gloomer could give you a line to an Indianapolis sales stable. They’d do the rest--as far as New York. What do you say!”

In a wild moment of incautious self-confidence, I responded:

“Anything to get to New York, Thropper.”

“It’s settled, then,” he responded. “Albert Priddy, horse chaperone, I salute thee,” and he gravely saluted me. “When will his lordship occupy his caboose?” he went on in good-humored raillery.

“As soon as I can get it!” I replied.

_Chapter XIX. A Chapter Which Has to do with a Series of Exciting Affairs that Occurred between the West and the East, and Which are Better to Read about than to Endure_

Thropper accompanied me to the wharf in Chicago where, so far as I was able to judge, we were to part forever. The manner of our parting was as follows:

Thropper insisted on carrying my suit-case, though his own was loaded to excess. On crossing a street to enter the railroad station, I half stumbled, blunderingly, under the heavy hoofs of a dray horse which a swearing driver had pulled shortly into the air, when Thropper, by a lunge at my back with his heavy suit-case, startled me into such action, that I lurched ahead and away from danger.

“Thanks, old fellow!” I called, above the roar of the traffic.

My train was announced, and as I gripped my suit-case, Thropper blurted out:

“Well, Priddy, I wish you luck: plenty of it!”

“Well,” I stammered, in return, “you’ve certainly been good to me, Thropper. I shall never forget it!”

“I shall miss you, Priddy!”

“Maybe I shan’t miss you, old fellow!” I said hoarsely, for I was on the verge of tears.

“God bless you!” cried Thropper, with an effort. “God be with you!”

“Make a man of yourself, old fellow!” I replied.

One moment of profound, tearful silence, with our hands tightly clasped, and then I broke away and ran as fast as I could towards my train, pretending by that action that I might be in danger of losing my train, though my only intention was to be by myself, where, unseen, I could baptize this parting from Thropper with unrestrained, heartfelt tears.

The brick-paved and marvellously wide streets of Indianapolis were oppressively hot when I arrived in the city, with Gloomer’s letter of introduction to the sales-stable manager in my possession. I had to spend two days in the city before a regular auction day arrived when it would be possible for me to make a contract with the manager. I had been told that the psychological time to approach the horse-dealer would be at a sale when a carload or two of horses would be made up.

During my wait, I had to harvest my cash diligently, for fear of getting stranded on the way. The four dollars in my pocket seemed indescribably trivial when measured against the gigantic journey I had between Indianapolis and New York City. I went on a side street and searched among the cheaper lodging-houses until I found one whose red, illuminated sign told me that beds there were fifteen cents a night. I went in, talked with a wizened-faced tramp of a man, and was shown up a flight of back stairs into a large, dirty-papered room, in which stood a wooden bedstead with dampish, musty coverings. As I slept that night, I was awakened by loud quarrelsome voices in the back kitchen, and from what I heard, I realized that I was sleeping in a thieves’ lodging-house. After that, I found myself waking up in nervous fright every few minutes, expecting to see the door open while some villain entered with a knife or gun to strip me of what little I owned! It was a night of horror, of wakeful, excited, dread. I was afraid to sleep, and yet I kept waking, hour after hour, with the consciousness that I had given in to sleep, and had made it possible for some one to overpower me. Then early morning dawned, without any accident befalling me, and I seized upon an excuse to leave. I went downstairs very stealthily and confronted three ragged, evil-faced men who were sitting on chairs, smoking with the landlord. I emptied a half-dozen soiled collars on the table and said:

“I haven’t time to have these laundered, and don’t need them. You may have them--if they fit. I wear fifteens. I have to leave early. Here is my lodging fee for the night. Good morning!” and without another word I rushed from the house, hoping that the men would imagine that my excitement was due to fear of losing a train rather than to any dread of them!

The only sight-seeing I accomplished in Indianapolis came in a long walk I took past the freight yards, at the end of which I came to a tomato ketchup factory, where, for two hours, I watched a carload of ripe and otherwise tomatoes unloaded in barrows and carted into the store vats. Then I hurried back to the stables, for a sale was due for late afternoon, and my heart was centred entirely upon the hope of securing the ride to New York City.

Guided by the snap of whips and the strident calls of the auctioneer, I entered a dim vault of a place, where the sale was in progress. After the glare of the sun had worn itself out of my eyes, I found myself on the outer edge of a large group of horse-dealers, watching the animals put through their paces and holding up fingers to the auctioneer.

After the sales had been concluded, I approached a cubby-hole, which was filled with stale tobacco smoke through which I had a view of lithographs of race horses. The manager of the stables sat at his desk, apparently not busy, but eloquent in cigar smoke over the sales he had made that day. He had a blown, raw face, as red as his sunset shirt bosom and dotted with unshaved blotches of bristles. His thin nose had been turned aside by a blow of some sort, his mild blue eyes might not have been out of place in a woman’s head. However, on seeing me hesitate, and probably knowing from my abject, petitioning manner, that I was after some favor, he flavored the air with an oath and tacked on an impatient demand as to my wants. I thereupon unfolded what was in my heart, and in the nervousness of the moment, instead of handing him Gloomer’s letter of introduction, gave him, instead, my pocket comb. Then I thought he would horse-whip me, but, instead, he laughed, and said:

“Well, you’re a thoroughbred, ain’t ye! What’s this?”

I thereupon exchanged the comb for the letter, which he took with some show of interest. After reading it he said:

“Why, I’d ship you to Jericho, if I was sending hosses that fur, but only thing I can do’s to send ye to Buffalo. You’ll mebbe get another haul from there, though I can’t say.”

I thought of the small amount of money in my pocket, and of the distance at which I found myself from home, and then said:

“I was told that you might be able to ship me to New York, sir. I need the lift. I have less than five dollars.”

“Sorry, kid,” he muttered. “Buffalo’s best thing in the ring for a week or more. Good day, sonny!”

“But I’ll take the chance to Buffalo,” I gasped, fearful that he would turn me off entirely. “I’ll be very thankful for that much of a ride, sir.”

He opened a drawer and wrote several items on a yellow way bill which he handed to me.

“Shove that in yer pocket and skedaddle, sonny,” he said. “I wish yer joy in yer ejucation, though I don’t in hang know what ye’ll do with it when yer got it; plant corn, in all likelihood. S’long! Train leaves at half-past six: freight yard. Numbers of the cars on the pass!”

At six o’clock I appeared in the terminal freight yards with a bag of three-cent egg sandwiches under one arm and with my slate-colored suit-case bumping against my shins. It was not until I reached the yards and beheld the illimitable maze of tracks and the innumerable dragon-like trains of freight cars and the hive of busy, shifting engines that were making up trains, that I realized how wise I had been by coming a half hour early. I asked a switchman where I should find the freight which left for Buffalo at half-past six. Then I realized still more acutely that my difficulties were only begun, for after he had whirled the lever over and allowed the section of shunted cars to rattle past, he turned to me and with a very decided and pugilistic gesture, asked me if I would not immediately consign myself and all my ancestors to a very negative theological place. I stumbled over the switches and as I went felt the hot, resentful glare of the railroad crews, as they refused me the information I sought and spiced their refusals with peppery idioms. They would have buffeted me had I not been armed by the pass. Finally, knowing that I was in danger of losing my train, I entered the switch-house and after I had gulped a stomachful of pipe-smoke, one of the men told me that I should find the train if I would look for the numbers of the cars which were written on the pass. So I went out in the dim twilight and tried to match numbers, which to my startled, nervous imagination looked like 54679900993259 and 563780533255555555573275, but which, in reality, were an inch or two shorter! Finally I found the two numbers, and then I eagerly ran down the length of the train until I came to the caboose. I climbed up the steps, opened the dusty door and was immediately greeted by the angry gaze of the conductor and brakemen who were busy with some sort of schedules.

As I humbly presented my pass to the conductor, and when it was made known to the crew that I was to be their guest in the comfortable caboose, they immediately gave me a lurid and explicit welcome: one that made me shiver. Genealogical connections of a hitherto unknown nature were ascribed to me; to them I appeared as one of the brood of imps from that negative theological place, and various exciting and blood-bringing adjectives were loaded on me that made my flesh quiver. The conductor, after generously and minutely explaining how undesirable was my presence in that caboose, going into the minutest details of my personal limitations, sent me, shuddering, over to the opposite side of the car, as far away as possible from his presence, where I found a padded window seat which was to be my bed overnight.

When the train started, and the crew were sitting around with nothing to do, I tried to enter into conversation with one of them. But I was _persona non grata_; of a different caste, I was told to “hang my lip on the clothes-hook,” a grewsome feat and quite a poetic conception. The window, a little square one, was high above my head. I stood on the seat in the attempt to look through it into the night. Immediately I was told to “switch off.” Then I made myself comfortable for the night by spreading myself at full length on the seat. After a time, the fumes of the lamp drugged me into a doze, and then the thunder of the freight and the dull, dull rumble of the train crew’s voices sent me off into a fretful, but long sleep. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, and looked out of the back door window, we were passing stations in Ohio. The morning was very pleasant, and thinking that a whole night of my presence might have made the train crew tolerant, I ascended into the lookout, above the roof of the caboose, where, from the cushioned seat, I could make a splendid observation of country through which we were passing. But my joy was short-lived. Immediately the thunders of the conductor called me down and I was sternly ordered to “sit down where you belong,” a command which was followed by a descriptive phrase which linked me to a low and disreputable order of creation.

By nine o’clock we brought up in the Cleveland yards, where a new caboose and a new train were to be fastened to the freight. I was told to “grab” my belongings and “git the-twelfth-letter-of-the-alphabet out of this!” which I did, and found, when I got to the ground, that the freight train had gone off and left the caboose standing in the yard. Then I went on a frightful, heart-thumping search for the two cars with the long numbers on them: not spending any time to be rebuffed by the yard men. I leaped from track to track and searched car after car until, at last, I found the numbers I wanted, and by following out the length of the train, came to the new caboose.

In this second caboose I resolved not to irritate the crew, and to this end I made myself comfortable in my allotted place, took off my boots, put on a pair of tennis shoes, and read a book I had in my suit-case. When the train finally entered the Buffalo freight yards I was hurried out, as the conductor wanted to lock the caboose without the loss of a minute. When I got to the ground, in my hurry, and after the conductor had locked the door and left me standing dazed, I found that I had left my shoes in the caboose. But no amount of search for the conductor succeeded, and finally one of the railroad men told me that I might as well give up the search, especially as the caboose had been whirled out of sight by a switching engine. So I went into the city with my suit-case and my lean purse, determined to visit the sales stables and stock-yards, until I should find a chance to ride on to New York City. I realized that if I should ever arrive in New York I should not have enough money to carry me home, but I followed a blind instinct which seemed to tell me that, New York attained, “something would turn up.”

In one of the back streets of Buffalo I found a Temperance Hotel, where beds and rooms were fifteen cents a day. The hotel had in its frowsy lobby a group of unkempt men who seemed to be temperate in one thing more strikingly than another,--work, for during any part of the day I found them there tipped back in the chairs holding their conferences on momentous matters. I left my umbrella with the clerk for collateral, and told him that further security for my board would be my suit-case which was certainly worth thirty-five cents. I had a good thirty-cent dinner in the dining-room, and then went out to visit the stock-yards of the city.

When I saw the multitude of cattle pens, near the railroad, and saw them filled with sheep and cattle, I estimated that in them alone were two hundred and fifty possible trips to the end of the world; but when I entered the lobby of the Stockman’s Hotel and tried to get the influence of the cattle-buyers towards a pass, they would have nothing to do with me. Thus rebuffed, I went the rounds of the sales stables, of which there were many facing the stock pens. In these I was told there were no sales on just then, but that if anything turned up they would see what they could do. That gave me hope, so I said that I would call on them during the next day.

During this wait I found that my money was nearly gone. I had fifty cents on hand for board. I asked a disreputable fellow, near the Temperance Hotel, where I could get some cheap meals. He pointed to the next street and told me that they had three-cent meals in some of the eating-houses there. That evening I indulged in a three-cent supper. It consisted of a dish of beans, a slice of bread, some “butter” and a cup of coffee. I went to the same place for breakfast the next morning and for three cents secured a cup of coffee, a doughnut, and a dish of stew. That morning a heavy rain began to fall, and, for the first time, I began to miss the shoes I had left in the caboose. I had on a suit of good clothes, so that the worn tennis shoes on my feet were all the more startling; but when the streets were filled with running brooks of rain through which I was forced to walk, it was not merely a matter of appearance with me, but a matter of comfort. On my way to the stock-yards to see what the sales stables could do for me, my feet were uncomfortably soaked to the skin. The canvas tops of the shoes were like mops. Every step I took on the sidewalk was the cause of a soggy, moppish slop. I expected the first policeman to arrest me as a suspicious character.

I went from stable to stable, and at each one asked in a tremulous voice if they were about to send any horses to New York or Boston in the near future, but neither sales nor shipments were being made. I tried to interest some of the stock-drovers in the cattle yards in my affairs, but evidently I bored them. I paid another, desperate visit to the Stockman’s Hotel, but the cattle-buyers would not give me a word of encouragement towards a pass to New York City.

After this I returned to the heart of the city and began to plan against absolute starvation. Even with three-cent meals I could not have a much longer time to eat unless I obtained some more money. Then I felt the bulge of my nickel-plated watch, in my vest pocket. I had paid a dollar for it and had used it for two years. It had been purchased second-hand from a mill friend and had originally cost not more than three dollars. I hurried to a pawn-broker’s shop and said, eagerly, as I handed the shopman the weighty time-piece:

“You can have this at your own price--I don’t care how much you offer. I need the money!”

He tossed the watch in the palm of his hand, then laughed, and as he handed it back to me he said, impatiently:

“G’wan! It ain’t wuth a flea! I wouldn’t buy dat t’ing fer junk! Git!”

Disconsolately I passed out, with the shopman’s scornful eyes on me, and the gaze of a burly negro and his wife following me. I had no sooner reached the sidewalk, however, than the negro came out and said:

“Say, how much yo’ want fo’ dat watch?”

The negro’s wife appeared, and from their excessive interest in the watch I knew that they would purchase it if I should put out an enticing price. I cogitated in my mind as to how much I might have to pay for a pair of second-hand shoes, and then said:

“Fifty cents! Keeps good time, too, see!”

The negro took the watch in his hand, and evidently it was the enormous size of it rather than its efficiency as a time-keeper that interested him, for he spent more time gazing on its back than he did in contemplating its works. He thrust his hand into his pockets and gave me a fifty-cent piece which, just then, looked as round and golden as a harvest moon, but more tangible.

I hurried from the negro as swiftly as I could in fear that he might repent and ask for a return of the precious coin. I hastened down a side street, made a spiral through a maze of streets, and then felt that the half dollar belonged to me. I next began a search for a pair of shoes. There were rows of them in a Jewish cobbler’s window, so I went in. The Jewish woman, who was in charge, in the absence of her husband, asked me what size I wanted, and then pulled out for my inspection a pair of iron-clads that would not have been amiss on the feet of Ulysses when he started out on his wearing travels, and they surely would have lasted him through all his strenuous adventures.

“Fifty-four cents!” announced the woman.

I told her that I could not spend a cent more than fifty for foot-wear else I should have to go without supper, and that wet feet were more comfortable than an empty stomach.

We then entered upon an oriental haggling during which I found it imperative to credit myself with every virtue of honesty and candidness, and during which she called on every prophet to witness that the shoes should not go for a cent less than fifty-four. I held up my soggy tennis shoes and tapped them on the floor so that their miserable splash should strike a compassionate chill in her hard heart. I told her my lifetime’s history; gave her a most pathetic list of my adventures; descanted with fervor on the unkindness of men towards one who was trying to make his way, and then the shoes were mine!

I had to learn to walk over again when the dry shoes were on. I half stumbled at first with the weight, but I felt that at last I could go on the main street of the city and pass among respectable people without having harsh comments made.

After my three-cent supper, I hurried to a church where a prayer-meeting was in progress. After the meeting I made a confidant of the minister, who took me before a group of men; the total result of which was that they lent me ten dollars on a note which I later paid, or tried to pay, but they refused to accept the money and sent me back my note. A scalper’s ticket to New York City took nearly all of the ten dollars. I returned to the “hotel” where I sold my umbrella and out of the proceeds paid my room rent and bade good-bye to the men who lounged there. The New York train which I had to take did not leave Buffalo until two o’clock in the morning. As I went through the quiet streets, the scavengers were out, with bags on their shoulders, fingering the refuse barrels that lined the curbs in front of hotels and eating-houses. It was a glimpse of poverty that made me shudder, and which by comparison made me feel quite aristocratic.

The conductor accepted my scalper’s ticket without comment, though he might have put me off the train on the least suspicion. I took off my heavy shoes, leaned back in the seat and fell asleep without a care to distract me while the express hummed smoothly through the night.

As soon as the train arrived in the New York station I had to hurry across the city to the steamboat wharves in time to board the Providence steamer for the dollar ride into the Fall River zone. Though I had never been in the metropolis before, and though I stood for a thrilling moment in the very midst of its wonders, impelling poverty drove me across the city like a slave-master’s whip, and I boarded the steamer with merely an impressionistic glance of some ferry-houses, some wholesale fruit houses, a dilapidated horse-car, some street corner blockades, a whiff of Hester street, and the East River bridges. After a night in the forward part of the boat, sleeping in a berth which might have been the confines of a barrel, while a drunken man next to me kept up a periodic, loose-mouthed protest to a man in the upper berth that he wished he wouldn’t snore so loud and keep everybody awake, I was put ashore in Providence. From there I was taken by trolley into Massachusetts and home. When I arrived in New Bedford I had thirty-five cents remaining in my pocket. But I was home! And ready for the next step in my education, whatever that should be.

_Chapter XX Aunt Millie’s Interpretation of Education. The Right Sort of an Adviser Gets Hold of me_

I hurried--with a feeling of pride--in the direction of the tenement where my aunt and uncle were living. It was nearly noon. I would surprise my aunt! I knocked on the door. My Aunt Millie stood before me.

“Hello!” I cried. “How are you?”

She gazed on me with evident surprise, and with a mixture of suspicion, which she put in her first words:

“I thought you were out getting made into a gentleman--at one of those schools?”

“Why, aunt, I’ve had two years of education--so far. I mean to have more.”

“But where’s that fortune you’ve made?”

I gasped.

“Fortune? I’ve only got thirty-five cents and I’m in debt for that!”

“It’s a failure, then?” she asked, maliciously.

“Of course it isn’t a failure!” I insisted, desperately. “Two years of it have helped me very much. I mean to get more of it, aunt!”

“But you look poorly dressed, and you tell me that you’re poorer than the day you went. I always thought education meant getting along in life!”

“It does mean getting along in life,” I argued, “but not necessarily getting along in money--or even good clothes. It has to do with the mind--with the thinking powers--eh--”

She burst into mocking laughter and said:

“Oh, that’s it? Then maybe you’ll not be needing bed and board now that you’ve had two years of education,--is that the state of things?”

“Oh, you don’t understand, aunt. Of course you can’t do much in the world with only two years of it. It needs several years of it before you can really get a position in which money or prestige may be made. I’m only just on the way: in the first stages.”

“Then why aren’t you in it? What have you come back to us for? I suppose you are short of money and want us to help you along in your brainless undertaking, eh?”

“Have I asked a cent from you during the last two years, aunt?” I asked with some show of spirit. “Haven’t I earned my own living even when I have been at home? Is it likely that I’ll ask you to help me through now?”

“It wouldn’t do any good if you were to ask us,” she said, firmly. “We have debts enough in the house now to drive us to distraction.”

“Of course,” I said, “it will be some weeks, probably, before I can shape my plans. You will let me stay here?”

“There,” she sniffed, “he’s coming the soft soap act on, now! I thought you had something up your sleeve. So you want me to board you free of charge for some weeks, eh, while you lord it around without working?”

“I shall have to plan just what to do next!” I announced, feeling that this last touch to my already heavy load would break me. “That’s all. I shall be going off to some sort of a school if it’s possible.”

“Two days free: that’s as long as you can stop without board,” she announced. “I never was for this hair-brained business. It’s taken your earnings away. After two days you must pay board.”

I knew it was fruitless to argue with her any further and I longed for the noon to arrive when I could have Uncle Stanwood’s more comforting greetings.

My uncle came in and was extremely pleased to greet me, and my return so unexpectedly considerably upset him.

“Two years of learning, steady,” he commented. “That’s good. You are the first Priddy to get such a chance. Make the most of it. Two years is a good beginning. I can notice a difference in your speech and your manner already. Keep on, Al!”

“His learning hasn’t given him any silk shirts or gold-headed canes, has it?” scoffed my Aunt Millie.

“Don’t heap it on the lad,” chided my uncle, “it’s taken a lot of courage and perhaps suffering for him to get through as he has. We haven’t done anything towards it, Millie; so we shouldn’t have much to say!”

Then my uncle asked a perfectly natural and innocent question.

“What are you aiming to be, Al, when you’re through with the schools?”

Tremblingly I whispered:

“A preacher, I think!”

If the world had cracked or the moon had leaped into the middle of our kitchen, my aunt could not have been more startled than she appeared to be at that announcement. She instantly rallied her powers of ridicule and sarcasm and indulged in the following monologue that had little savor of love in it:

“Oh, oh! That’s the lay of the land, is it? A parson! A Priddy a parson! A fawning, hypocritical parson! A tea-drinking, smirking thing in black. Why, at least, didn’t he choose to be a lawyer or a doctor or something worth while? I thought he had brains!”

“Millie!” thundered uncle. “Shut up! Do you want to crush the lad?”

But she was not to be stopped. She grew almost hysterical in her tirade.

“I suppose he’ll be hurling his sermons at us, so sanctimonious and pious!”

“Hush, aunt, please,” I pleaded, “don’t shout so loud, people will hear and wonder what’s wrong!”

“There,” she went on with a dry laugh, “just hear that low voice: it’s just the voice for a parson!” Then she posed before me in dreadful mimicry, with her finger tips touching in front of her and an affected, upward cast in her eyes, while she cried, ingratiatingly:

“‘Be good, be very, _very_ good, my dears! Do right like me and get to heaven!’” and then releasing herself from this display she suddenly roared, “You old hypocrite, you! The idea, _you_ a parson!”

“God knows,” muttered uncle, “it is to be wondered how a lad brought up with us could ever turn his eyes in that direction!”

At that my Aunt Millie cast on her husband a frown and said, snappishly:

“Aye, you old sinner. Your conscience is working now. No wonder you talk like that!”

During the dinner, while my aunt was in the pantry, uncle bent towards me and whispered:

“Come out with me after dinner, Al. We’ll talk there!”

At half-past twelve we left the house together and sat down on some logs on an empty lot near the mill where uncle said, after I had recounted to him my two years’ experiences:

“But what can you do now? It seems that you have cut yourself off from everything by leaving that school. You have nothing to go to now!”

“Oh,” I replied, “there are scores of places that I might go to in the East here, if I only knew where to look. Rather than be idle, I might go to the local high school and work during the spare time for my board and clothes. Then there are free academies and preparatory schools where I might get a chance. I will begin to look around. Mr. Woodward, the minister, might know of some things. I mean to see him this afternoon. I shall try to keep on with my studies somehow.”

“Why don’t you go into the mill for awhile and then get some money by you, Al. It would make it easier for you?”

“But I can’t spare the time, uncle. I ought to keep right in with an unbroken school career. It can be done if only the right place be found. I am all at sea, just now, but I shall inquire. I know I shall find something.”

We talked until the one o’clock whistle sounded, and then I went in the direction of the minister’s house to consult with him concerning my future.

Mr. Woodward was minister over a little church of mill people, one of those underpaid men who not only preach faith but express it in many kindly but unheralded services to society. He obtained congenial work for overworked factory girls, sent tired mothers into the country in the summer season, sent invalids to hospitals, inspired mill lads in self-culture, and kept his own busy mind furnished with the latest and most scholarly information in social science and theology.

When I rang his door-bell my heart nearly failed me with the thought that as he had never had the privilege of attending a college or a theological seminary, he might be unable to give me any advice on my immediate problem.

But after we had sat in his study for an hour, and he had sounded me on my past experiences, and when I had concluded with a very pessimistic exclamation,

“But I guess I’ve thrown away my chance by leaving Evangelical University, Mr. Woodward. I don’t know what took possession of me, I’m sure. It was such a whim, especially when I was doing so well out there!”

The big Scotchman stood up, laid his heavy hand on my shoulder and exclaimed,

“Albert, I think I see you continuing the fight from now on, if I can possibly do anything. You must have courage and faith; they are more to you than money.” He swept his hand across his eyes as if to sweep back the years and said, reminiscently,

“Oh, if I’d had your chance, lad! You don’t know what it cost me to lose my chance! Listen!” He then recounted to me his own experience in search of an education and unfolded dramatic incident after dramatic incident for my encouragement. He showed me himself by a peat-bog fire, in the north of Ireland, amidst poverty, struggling with his few books. He showed me himself, an immigrant landing in New England, where he began to work in the flare of a furnace. Next he showed me how his chance for going to college had been cut off by his marriage. That was followed by the picture of him, sitting in a room through the day learning Greek and theology, while his wife went into the mill to earn the money for rent and clothes and books. The memory of those severe struggles which had cost nerve and health brought tears swimming into his kindly eyes. He said, in conclusion,

“Why, if I were in your place, lad, I’d black boots to get to a college, I would. Don’t lose a day. I know a theological seminary in high standing where you can get as good a training for the ministry as may be secured anywhere in the United States, where your mind will awaken and where you may not feel ashamed after graduating from it. From there you can go to a college, entering the Junior year. That will mean five years more, Albert, five years of blessed privilege, which I shall envy you, lad!”

“But I have no money, and it must cost money to enter the theological seminary,” I insisted. “I should have to get there, and there would occur several expenses for books and things when I get there.”

“I can get fifty dollars for you on a note, which I will secure. Trust me,” replied Mr. Woodward. “I mean that you shall go ahead. The world can’t afford to let one of its ambitious lads slip up. It’s not good economy. Fifty dollars will start you off. The expenses at the seminary are trivial. There will occur opportunities for self-help. In the summer you may get a church. Come to me tomorrow afternoon. I’ll get busy with the telephone and telegraph right away. The Seminary opens this week. Come tomorrow, lad, and I hope to have good news for you. I feel that you’ve got your chance!”

As I left him standing at the door, gazing after me, I hurried home whistling; thinking, too, what an overturn of emotion can occur in a single day.

_Chapter XXI. Over the Sea to a New Educational Chance. How I Revenged Myself on the Hungry Days. The Cloistered Serenity of the New Place_

The following afternoon when I arrived at Mr. Woodward’s house, I found a young man with him, whom he introduced as Mr. Blake, a Congregational minister from a nearby town, whom he had invited in to talk to me about the Seminary.

“Mr. Blake graduated there a few years ago and can tell you all about it,” added my friend.

“Had you better not show him the telegram you have from the President of the Seminary?” suggested the young man.

Mr. Woodward smiled, and showed me a telegram which read,

“Send the young man at once!” and bore the signature of the Seminary President.

Then Mr. Woodward put his hand into his pocket and brought out from thence a cluster of crinkling bills.

“Hold your hand, Albert,” he smiled. “It’s money!”

He counted into my hand fifty dollars and said,

“If you are energetic, this is all the money you will have to borrow for awhile. I am glad for you, my lad. Now I have to attend a funeral. You go out for a walk with Mr. Blake and come back with him in time for supper. We’re to have an informal celebration together.”

I led Mr. Blake to the Point Road, the peninsula which juts out like a forefinger from the south end of New Bedford into Buzzard’s Bay. We walked along the grassy foot-path, near the low wall, past the shimmering sea, the flying, croaking gulls, and a parade of scallop boats. My companion had a very ambitious moustache which was trying hard to mature, and he had a trick of unconsciously aiding the ends by pulling them as he talked. While he interjected theological shop talk, and had a long dissertation on Textual Criticism versus Literal Inspiration, when he found that I had been in such a conservative theological atmosphere as Evangelical University, and though he prattled familiarly the names of Renan, Weissmann, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl, I found inspiration in the man himself, for I kept thinking to myself on that walk, “He has attained to what you are after.” We came to a grove of spruces that had grown on the edge of some rocks by the side of the road. Here, a quartet of blue-bloused Chinamen were celebrating some sort of a holiday by playing strident tunes on queer pipes and tom-toms, joining in with their falsetto voices. Mr. Blake and I found a secure place on some ledges, from which we could throw pebbles at the white gulls that walked up and down the beach in lady-like fashion.

When we returned, at the supper hour, we sat down with Mr. Woodward at the table, where both men set my head to whirling by the confidence with which they recounted my future enjoyment of the Seminary. Had it not been for the crumpled fifty dollars in my pocket, the entire experience would have had the shape of a dream, for only two days before I had stood before my critical aunt with no plans and with thirty-five cents for my fortune. My freight ride and Buffalo experience seemed years back, in a dim haze.

On arriving home, I pulled out the fifty dollars and showed the amount to my aunt and uncle.

“Where did you get all that?” gasped my uncle.

“Borrowed it,” I replied. “I go to a theological seminary in two days.”

My aunt wanted to know what sort of a lunatic I was to borrow money on which to get an education. Her theory yet remained, that only those with large fortunes were entitled to an education.

But from the shining eyes of my uncle, I gathered that he felt glad over my prospects, as I unfolded them to him.

Two evenings later I sat on the hurricane deck of a steamer that was to carry me to the Seminary city. I watched the golden dome of the State House dwindle to the size of a noonday sun. I watched the waves from our paddles wash the edges of innumerable islands. We passed the lighthouses: huge warning fingers flashing their diamond lights. Our bow foam swirled over the low-lying decks of loaded coasters. Then we entered the silences of the ocean: even the sun left us and we swirled into night. The dismal echoes of bending bell-buoys reached our ears out of the darkness. The chilly, night wind threatened us with influenza, so we hurried into the cabins where, under bright lights, people were chatting, and where, in a far corner, a musician was tickling the popular tune from the piano:

“All the Stars in the Sky, Dear, Speak through the Night of You-u-u!”

When the glistening negro, in spotless white, rushed through the cabin, waving a pink-bordered towel and muttering to the ceiling or to the thick carpet, as if it were no concern of his, that this was “the last call for dinner,” I felt that I would adventure into the considerable menu a dollar would bring me, if for nothing else but to atone for those hungry days of three-cent meals in Indianapolis and Buffalo!

The next morning the steamer was poking its prow insistently through the sea and through a drizzling rainstorm. We were near land again and passed bleak islands hardly bigger than a man’s hand on which were exiled lonesome, bleating sheep. Then we left the bays back of us and entered the mouth of a river roadway whose banks were lined with golden foliage. We passed a grim, grey fort and then stopped at a quiet town whose roofs were buried in tall trees, which in turn were topped by the spires of two old-fashioned churches which seemed to be telling the townspeople in which direction God was to be found. The river roadway deepened and narrowed and twisted as we ascended it. Then we left the autumn beauties of tree and shrub and passed between ice-houses, factories, and tenements until a bridge marked the limits of navigation and we were put ashore in the Seminary city.

The steamboat wharf was the front porch to a large city which began at the summit of a hill to the south, crowded the hillside, wandered into the valley, and ascended another hill and continued on it as far as the eye could reach. I walked over the cobbled street in front of the wharf shed, made my way past long rows of cordage and commercial houses, and came out into a triangular market-place, shut in by low-set brick and wooden houses, cheap hotels, fruit, fish, and sailors’ clothing stores. The market-place was thronged with wagons and stalls. In one section the hay wagons were massed and over them groups of stablemen and citizens argued until load after load had been sold. In another section, with their backs forming an aisle through which I walked, were the butcher-carts offering roasts, strings of sausage, coral strings of frankfurts, and whole sides of pork. Back of them were the vegetable carts with loads of squashes fresh from the fields and heaps of greens. After walking through this noisy market, I came to the main business street of the city, lined with stores and humming with cars. Then I walked up a hill past residences and dying grass lawns, until, in a triangular fence which followed the parting of two streets, I had my first view of the theological seminary.

The seminary was separated from the modern houses about it not only by the fence, but also by its age, its soberness, its shaded walks, and its ample stretches of lawn. Behind the leaves of the trees I saw one of those mill-like dormitories which our stern, eighteenth-century forefathers loved to build when they planned colleges and seminaries. The whole aspect of the place, as I entered the gate, was one of monkish repose, of academic sedateness. The drab paint on the porches of the dormitory and covering the professors’ houses, the dignified layers of brick in the chapel, all said, as plainly as you please, “Don’t laugh here!” All my early dreams concerning how colleges and places of learning should look, were realized. The very bricks in the buildings seemed to be after a theological education.

As I put my foot on the porch a young man met me, asked me if I was “Mr. Priddy,” and on learning that I was, he escorted me immediately over to the president’s house, where the final arrangements for my matriculation in the Seminary were completed. An hour later, under the guidance of Burner, who was an upper-classman, I was purchasing an oil lamp, a parlor stove, a ton of coal, a wash basin, two coal-hods, and sundry decorations. Two hours after that I had unpacked my belongings in a double room on the fourth floor of the dormitory, and when the chapel bell sounded for supper, Burner conducted me into a very old-fashioned Commons, on the walls of which were paintings of ships and shipwrecks. Here I was introduced to the students and then found myself eating voraciously of the fare that was set before me.

The next morning, I was awakened by the piping of a little bird that sang on the window ledge, under the open window.

_Chapter XXII. Stoves with Traditions, Domestic Habits, and Greek, “Boys Will be Boys”_

The apocalyptic hope of the students who were domiciled in Therenton Hall, the Seminary dormitory, included steam heat and running water; for neither of those modern conveniences had been installed up to that time and students had to carry hods of coal up four flights of stairs; and were compelled to convey pitchers of water the same distance. Each one had his own coal bin in the vaulted cellar and also owned a kindling pile which he watched with suspicious and amusing jealousy. Besides that, ashes had to be raked from stoves, carried downstairs, and sifted--by the thrifty--in a far corner of the cellar, where lay the dormitory ash heap.

The parlor stoves, coal-hods, water bowls, and pitchers, the personal possessions of the students, were handed down from class to class, in many instances, until the most trivial price--say a dollar for a six-foot stove--gave a profit of ten cents and three years’ use to the senior who sold out. The stove I purchased for two dollars was a giant of a stove, high, bulky, and lavishly decorated with ring-a-rosy cherubs, covered with a thick coating of stove polish until they had ceased being an angelic silver and had become an Ethiopian black. I mention this stove because its sheet-tin girth was hallowed by hoary traditions, and if it could have spoken it would have kept me cheered for many hours by a recital of the different escapades in which it had figured at the hands of the theologues. The rust on its bands, for instance, was due to the fact that some students had plastered it with a swaddling of sticky fly paper. The dent immediately under the hood had been made by a flying theological treatise which had been aimed originally at the head of an intruder, who insisted on keeping one of the stove’s former owners from a study of Hebrew nouns. The broken foot, which rested on some thin wafers of wood, was caused by the attempt on the part of some students to reverse the stove during the absence of another owner who was paying court to one of the young women in the city.

We attended to the dusting and care of our own rooms with more or less thoroughness. Some of my friends chose to sleep and study amidst dust and disorder rather than to endure the strain and toil of a sweeper, a beater, and a duster for a Saturday morning. When we went to a city prayer-meeting or a lecture, we would usually dangle our greasy kerosene cans as far as the corner grocery and leave them to be filled. In fact, so inextricably interwoven with our intellectual concerns were our domestic habits, that I had not been in the dormitory very long before I caught myself entering my Greek class holding fast to a coal-hod, which I had taken the trouble to carry along the walk and into the recitation building, while I had unconsciously propped my Greek Testament very snugly behind the lower banister, under the impression that it had been the coal-hod.

One Saturday morning, Providence or Fate--whatever it would be at a theological seminary--arranged a _mise en scène_ which called attention, in an effective way, to the inconvenience of permitting the students the use of coal-hods and wash bowls. The President was entertaining a gentleman who had been the first donor to our new and splendid gymnasium. He had escorted the benefactor through the bathrooms, the bowling-alleys, over the running-track, and had taken him among the equipment, with evidences of great pleasure. I had occasion to be leaving the gymnasium in their wake. I saw the President throw open the door which led into the lower hall of the dormitory and heard him say, “This is our dormitory--” or something to that effect, and he stepped back to allow the seminary benefactor to precede him into the dignified precincts of our domicile. Then he followed, and one may imagine how he must have felt, as he gazed upon a chaos of coal, of wood, of water, and of broken crockery, which lay like the trail of a sloven over the hall and over the first flight of steps; echoes from the preceding night, when the top floor had engaged the lower floors in a counter demonstration of noise, smash, and confusion.

_Chapter XXIII. A Plot Which had for its End the Raising up of a Discouraged Young Preacher_