Chapter XL (7)

The parish to which I ministered during my last year in the Seminary, and in which I planned to settle immediately upon graduation, was in a seaport town of a quaint type: buried back in the rugged coast lines of the Atlantic. The Embargo Act had been like the chilling breath of petrification on the East Indiamen, the Ceylon traders, the China brigs, and the many other ships which had gone out from its port. The wharves to which of old time these sea-rovers had been tied when in port had rotted until, in my day, the water-front was outlined by their black, damp, soggy ruins. Here and there, outside the precincts of the town, half buried among young saplings and deep grasses, could be seen the piles and planks of a once stout wharf. In the village itself, almost everything pointed, with an index finger, to the past as the scene of the town’s glory. The hotel in which I stayed, in stage-coach days had been a tavern, and from the porch of it the landlord, wearer of a blue military coat with brass buttons, had fed the wild birds and pigeons. The house had an office-boy who was seventy odd years old, a man whose clothes and speech were tinctured with reminiscences of the sea and the past glory of the village. As one tipped back in one of the hundred-year-old chairs, which were whittled, by loungers’ pocket knives, to skeletons of rungs and seats, one saw slow-pacing oxen, nodding their heads in two-four metronomic time, pulling loads of sun-dried, salted codfish from the outdoor driers to the packing factory. In the parlors, on the hillside, were many interesting relics of the past, left by the race of sea captains and ship-owners almost extinct. There were trinket boxes made from scented, oriental woods, and little Ceylon gods of brass and porcelain. There were Japanese ivories and vases and draperies. There were ebony ornaments from savage islands and carved novelties, the product of barbarous intelligence.

The old families, remaining in the village, were of that splendid Puritan sort who serve God with mind, heart, and purse, and while the older men and women remained at home, the sons and daughters, blessed with their heritage, had gone out into the world to do no small share of the brilliant and serviceable tasks for which honor and wealth are given. When the bells on the two churches rang, on Sunday mornings, one waited for the other, so that they might ring in antiphonal brotherhood, seeming to say, “Good morning,” and to reply, “Good morning,” in praise of the doctrinal harmony in the parishes where, in the by-gone years, opposing pulpits had been girt about with demoniac lightnings and surmounted by the wild-eyed heresies of dethroned angels.

In addition to the salary for my preaching, a white, green-shuttered, iridescent-windowed parsonage, perched on a summit of grass terraces, stood ready, as my home, whenever I should want it; in other words, as members of my parish phrased it, “when I should bring Mrs. Priddy!” Now a twelve-roomed house, rent free, perched on grass terraces, guarded on one side by a syringa and on the other side by some red currant bushes, says nothing to a young bachelor theologue, about to graduate, but, “How about a wife?” As there was no ignoring such a house, there was no ignoring its consequent,--a wife. The two, like a “neither” and “nor,” went together. Probably that is why parishes generally see to it that there is a parsonage, especially where young ministers are concerned: that such a concrete suggestion will work on the mind and heart of their minister, through the night hours with all the terror of an inescapable dream, in the day hours as a thing to be accounted for whether or no. There is, perhaps, no suggestion more haunting can befall a young, bachelor minister, than an unoccupied, Colonial parsonage, standing on a summit of terraces, unoccupied! If he rents it to outside parties, it is one way of saying to your parish, “I am too cowardly to marry!” If he permits it to remain empty, he has to spend many precious hours explaining to the church committee and their wives his good reasons for having it empty, and there are so few good reasons that the task is no desirable one.

However, Destiny, using a strange mouthpiece, showed me a clear path in the matter. It came about in this wise.

The lower floor, in the east wing of Therenton Hall, at the Seminary, was devoted to social purposes. It was the meeting-place of the students immediately after supper, where all sorts of recreations were indulged. A song, a piano solo, a burlesque, or a bit of clever mimicry was usually in order in that place. It was ostensibly a reading-room, where, on the tables, were to be found magazines of interest to theological students.

It was in this room where our freak visitors came to describe to us their specialties: men who came and tried to woo us from study to strange, emotional cults; men who came and told us, to our faces, with prophetic fearlessness of consequences, that by our alignment to the Seminary, and to _any_ institution of learning, we were making ourselves heretics and outcasts. One evening, at the supper table, in Commons, Bobbett announced that “Professor Hoyle, a fellow that feels bumps, a phrenologist, would be in the reading-room, ready to read our capabilities, our faults, and our destinies for twenty-five cents a head, special price to theological students from the usual fifty-cent rate. No satisfaction, no pay!”

Town lassies, in medieval Europe, never flocked to palm-reader or card-turner, with more curiosity or “pooh-poohing,” than did we. On the way through the yard, the same critical faculties which we had brought to bear on “hallucinations” and “superstitions” in our studies of psychology and savage religions were brought to bear upon our impending interview with “Professor Hoyle.” Certainly the majority of us, by the time we had entered the parlor, were there on account of no other emotion than the wish to bring to bear on this man’s acts our trained, critical, scientific acumen; though it cost us twenty-five cents!

The “professor” was waiting for us, a tall, slightly stooped, well-dressed young man. He made no claims, no speech. He merely said,

“Come up, one following another, and after I have examined you and made a note of my findings, I will write out each one’s report on paper and if it does not suit, why none need pay.”

One after another then we filed into the chair and had those pliant, nervous, cold fingers steal, subtly, over our cranial topographies. Silently, quickly, skilfully, bumps that nature had placed on our skulls, and bumps that basket-ball and parallel bars had induced, were sorted out, interpreted, and their meanings put on a pad of paper, against our names. Then, after some moments of scratching, the “professor” handed each one of us his report. Laughingly they were received, laughingly they were perused, and then looks of startled wonder were the rule, for in some unaccountable way, the “professor” had managed to find strange true interpretations of us. He informed one student that if the latter had not planned to become a minister, he would have done well at mechanical engineering, a vocation in which the student had had some proficiency. There were some intimate revelations for each one of us, true appraisals of temperament, inclination, and habit. But it was the unknown things over which we smiled, the mysterious future, which we were ready to believe on account of the truthfulness with which he had told our present. Instantly the parsonage on the summit of grass terraces came into mind, as the last words of my phrenological report read:

“Love: brown-haired young woman.”

I paid my quarter, willingly, and went to my room, linking an unknown, unnamed, intangible “brown-haired young woman” with the waiting parsonage.

_Chapter XXIX. It Devolves upon me to Entertain a Guest and the Sentimental Consequences Which Ensued_

Then, as if in conspiracy with the traveling phrenologist, the Seminary itself made “the brown-haired young woman,” concrete, before my eyes.

As the emotional revival had been the feature, the advertised feature of Evangelical University, so Lecture Week was the unique, advertised feature of the Seminary. As the Revival was doctrinal, controversial, and excessively unintellectual, so Lecture Week was undoctrinal, constructive, and preëminently intellectual. Lecture Week was, par excellence, one of the most inspiring intellectual treats of a week’s duration to be found within the bounds of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For the special lecturers of the year pooled interests and appeared together. These lecturers were preëminent men drawn from the ranks of highest achievement: specialists of high, world-wide repute on preaching, social service, and _belles lettres_. They were men for whose speech and thought any student would gladly put aside treatises on oratory and explanations of social movements and interpretations of literature, and give himself entirely into their safe-keeping. Three words were inscribed over those precious, inspiring weeks: “Golden Speech,” “Ripe Thoughts,” and “Impressive Personalities!” Students were never the same in ambitions after the lecturers had shuffled their notes into their leather pouches and left: I had one student preach for me the Sunday following one such week, and there, before the eyes of my parishioners, some of whom had been in attendance on the lectures, appeared an excellent facsimile of the noted divine who had given the course on preaching; the student stroked back his hair exactly as the noted man had done, he leaned over the pulpit in perfect accord with the latter’s peculiar and distinguishing trait; even some of his climaxes and intonations of voice followed those used by the famous preacher in his most forceful oratorical moments. I think this student was not alone among those who played the sedulous ape to the Lecture Week speakers. I know that more than once I caught myself thinking that probably a change in method to that of Dr. Gladden’s conversational ease might impress my audience à la Dr. Gladden.

During that week the Seminary became a generous host to the country ministers, not only sending the poorer ones an urgent invitation to the feast, but following very closely that gospel which urges one to go out into the highways and compel them to come, for she aided some by railway fares, helped others by having the fares reduced, and when she had them into the city, gave them free lodgings in the dormitory and in the gymnasium, with students for chambermaids and professors for general managers of departments.

The result, in my senior year, for Lecture Week, was inspiring. The heroic preachers from the isolated parishes, who in true poverty and in chastity of heart hold up God’s light amidst a darkened, back way, came to us in their brushed-up frayed frock coats and white percale ties to find themselves somewhat surprised at the city ministers, who not only did not wear white ties during the week-days, but had even left their frock coats at home to appear on the campus more like doctors on holidays than sedate ministers of the gospel. However, in heart, neither frock nor sack coats made a difference, for it was astounding how boyish and playful the faces of both city ministers and country missionaries became in the interim of lectures, or at night when in the midnight hours some sedate man would get out of his cot, skulk past the snoring brethren who were arrayed in a row on the cots in the gymnasium, and either by rolling a thundering bowling ball at the pins, or by some other act of deliberate mischief, awaken Babel!

Morning, afternoon, and evening the city people united with the seminary members in crowding the lecture hall; school-teachers, women’s clubs, college professors and college students, librarians, esthetic clerks, intellectually inclined mill-workers, doctors, lawyers, and church people,--these were in evidence always, for the lecturers’ names, and the three poles of their thought--religion, social service, and letters--made a universal appeal. In fact, it must have somewhat embarrassed the speakers to have been called in to lecture to theological students and find before them all the Gentiles of the city. In any case, the speakers who had been so uninformed as to head each separate lecture, whether on “The Pastor in his Study,” “The Turmoil in Society,” or “The Supremacy of Browning over the Saxon Heart,” with the usual, “My Dear Young Men,” were compelled, on appearing, to make it read, “The Citizens of this City, Visiting School-teachers and Professors, the Faculty and my Dear Young Friends of the Seminary! Ahem!” and then go ahead and wonder how the Barbarians would be interested in what was intended for the Greeks! It was, in all, a reincarnation of a medieval monastery acting as light-bringer, with this difference, that the Seminary’s light was a Welsbach burner and no smoky fish-oil one that made a fog!

The visiting clergymen who had overrun the privacy of the Seminary left, and the parishes in the back places were to ring with the echoes of Lecture Week, and from many and many a dried-up well in the mind and heart of a minister who had never had money enough for timely books or visits to inspiring conferences, was to be flowing living, leaping water for months after. One missionary pastor, however, had been left within the precincts of the Seminary, a missionary whose work lay far back from the railroad, amidst the heavy, drifted snow roads in winter and amidst the serenity of the isolated hills and fields in summer; a missionary preacher who had been to a college, but not a theological seminary, and one who evidently strongly believed in equal suffrage--for this minister was a “brown-haired young woman.” She attended our classes in company with an elderly woman student and was present when our homiletical professor, to make his instruction clear as to how we should engineer a wedding, took a long and short man, called one the bride and the other the groom, and had them plight their troth before us, _ex more_.

One evening I sat at a supper table in the family hotel to where I had transferred my appetite, when I was surprised to see the busy little woman manager guide the “brown-haired young woman” over to my table and say, without a lift of the brow, as she came,

“She is a minister and you are to be a minister, I think you ought to sit at the same table!”

She left the young woman sitting opposite me at the table, not being aware that we were strangers to each other. But there we were, and it seemed as if the phrenologist’s ghost must have been wandering near, though by that time I had put his report out of mind entirely.

Suddenly it was rumored about the Seminary that I had in charge the entertainment of our guest, the missionary, and students stumbled over us in the most unexpected places, as we took our walks over the city. Curious persons began to speak about the usefulness of a wife who could herself take to the pulpit! It was even reported about the Seminary that some day she would be writing my sermons!

When the missionary had returned to her parish a sharp watch was kept over the mail box at the foot of Therenton Hall stairway, for it was expected that probably some correspondence would take place between the missionary and myself. Some letters did pass between us, though those from the missionary conveyed to me the fact, expressed in clear, unequivocal language, that she was wedded to her mission and felt that her whole life and sympathy belonged to her people, despite any personal wishes of her own. The matter had reached that stage when examination and graduation week drew near, a time which brought suffering with it.

_Chapter XXX. A Heretic Hunter. The Orthodoxy of the Seminary Admirably Defended. I Contract a Fashionable Disease, and also Receive a Very Unsettling Letter_

The fifty-year-old elms are budding; the shapely Norway maples are bursting into May leafing; the sun, after having melted away the ice and packed snow in the north corners, is now pouring down over the sloping field in front of the dormitory porch; the snow shovels which the students have used through the snowy winter months in clearing gridirons of paths--a task which they have chosen by lot--these tools of winter have been packed away in remote corners of the vaulted cellar. There is a slack fire kept in the stoves, a sure sign of a seminary spring. One or two bicycles are seen leaning against the steps of the chapel, waiting for their owners to come from class and take a ride over the hills. Nature has set the campus for loafers, but the professors have chosen the dramatic month of May for the hard grind of final examinations! Just about this time the students begin to debate very seriously on this matter, of acute interest--to them: “Resolved: That Examinations Do Not Gauge the Mental Fitness of a Student,” and substantiate their proposition by the following proofs:

“That examinations induce nervousness, prohibiting the student from actually expressing what is actually in his mind.

“That all knowledge cannot be put on paper, for it is possible for a man to profit by study and yet not be able to give proof of it when asked.

“That examinations depend upon memory: that all students are not perfect in memory--” and the many other usual arguments which examinations, from the earliest times, must have had against them.

But, in the Seminary, these examinations on paper, while almost decisive, were supplemented by oral examinations, made in public, with full liberty given to any visitors, especially visiting ministers, to ask questions. Immediately it is seen what a heresy-hunting, heretic-discovering opportunity these oral examinations gave: for if ever a study has brought men’s thumbs into the screw and men’s necks into nooses, and caused the suspicions of men to flame into white heat, has it not been Theology?

For two years I had sat with my fellow victims in the little chapel where our hymns of praise and our prayers had been wont to ascend. Class by class we sat, the lower classes unimportant in dramatic possibilities because they were to be examined merely on Hebrew and Church History, and surely it would have taken a persecutor with a keener nose than Hildebrand or a Scotch vestryman to cull a heresy on the Trinity or the Virgin Birth from a _hiphil_ or a _hophal_ or a padrigram with a _kametshhatauph_ in it! In fact, after a minister has been away from the Seminary a few years, he attends these oral examinations in Hebrew, merely to nod his head at the recital of every jot and the pronunciation of every drunken row of consonants, as if it were a matter of every-day understanding with him, and needed no comment! At least, it seemed so to me as I watched during my first experience as a participant in an oral examination in Hebrew. Neither is there much of a chance for heresy-hunting in Church History, for is it not, in itself, a record of heresy after heresy? But “the senior class in Theology!” The mere announcement of such an event is enough to lure from his tombs every theological ragger who ever drew breath. Think of the chance: to be given _carte blanche_ with eight young students who are ready to be quizzed on their theology!

The senior class sit in their students’ chairs hardly comprehending what they face. Perhaps because they are young and have a certain amount of _bel esprit_, in any case, they sit ready; each one ready to take up arms in defense of the orthodoxy of the seminary of that present year against the orthodoxy of the seminary forty, fifty, or fifty-eight years ago; a clash which may have in it every element of theological tragedy. That there may be need of it is clear, for in the second settee of visitors sits a white-haired, stern-faced minister, who had stopped progress before Darwin wakened the world, or ever First Isaiah was said to have a double, or before such startling queries as “What Sage Influenced the Psalter?” and “Did the Code of Hammurabi Help Moses?” began to be made. He antedates those novelties: is strongly entrenched, unwilling to lend his ear to them lest Zion’s song be not heard. Traditions of this man have been handed down to the seniors, who now sit ready for his ringing challenge. They know he is waiting eagerly for them, to follow every word, every answer that has in it any deviation from the straight doctrine of _his_ senior year!

The examination begins. First the professor asks some questions that will indicate the range and character of his instruction. The old man jots down something in a note-book, which he holds in his hand, for he is experienced in these matters. Then the cross-examination ensues. The old minister asks, first of all, in a bewildered voice,

“Do you mean to say, young gentleman, that the first sin was not done in the Garden of Eden, as exactly recorded? Does the Seminary teach that?”

The student replies, at length, showing, in terms of modern research and science, exactly what he means: that he has not denied the terrible fact of sin nor of its penalties, etc.

But, in the audience sit some younger men, recently graduated, who, by skilfully injected questions, deflect examination into constructive and spiritual channels, bringing out from the students the rich faith that they have to preach and the helpful doctrine that they mean to proclaim to men, and the examination closes with only one man imagining that faith is on its last legs through too much wisdom.

These parlous times of test, of trial were approaching for me, and I had my class note-books in order on my desk, for a review, when one morning I awoke suffering agony from the then fashionable ailment--appendicitis; just at a time when the papers were reporting that some Philadelphia society women were compelling doctors to operate on them as a new fad! The student across the hall opened his medicine-closet and made me a very stout and vigorous mustard plaster; but that did not avail. Then the doctors were asked in and gave out the news that I should have to be operated upon immediately. Visions of graduation melted in thin air. While a carriage was secured, I dictated two short letters, not knowing whether they would be my last. Then I had my friend read me a letter which the missionary had sent. It was a letter to the effect that she felt that our personal feelings should be put aside in order that she might devote herself to God’s work. It pleaded that we should bring our correspondence to an end, in order not to heighten the tragedy to which the matter had reached. The words were like knife blades driven deep, and causing a pain more acute than that physical pain which had brought me next door to death.

As the students carried me downstairs and put me in the carriage, they saw my face contorted and purple with physical agony.

_Chapter XXXI. How Some of the Joys of Friendship Came to me in the Tower Room. The Orator in the White Vest. How Soon I Lost my Diploma_

From the ether cone which a house surgeon had held over my nostrils I breathed unconsciousness and peace. I awoke in a tower room, with a semi-circle of bright windows letting in the morning sun on me, and with a quiet-motioned, white-capped nurse watching me as I struggled free from grim dreams and tried to regain my right mind. The merest turn of the eyes toward the low windows permitted me to see the May day outside: a day in which salmon fishers came in boats up the river and patiently, skilfully lured giant fish from the deep waters to their bags.

The little, bare room was soon colored with gifts of flowers from friends in my parish, from my classmates in the Seminary, and from the missionary. Letters of consolation and good cheer, visits from the president of the Seminary, who told me not to fret about examinations, because I should graduate, and cheering minutes with my class friends took the edge from my suffering. One morning a delegation of little children came bashfully into the room, and after standing in a row before me, each waiting for the other to speak,--for they represented the children whom I had organized in the mission church, two years before,--one of them, a little girl, stepped forward and with a quick thrust put on my white coverlet a paper bag, saying:

“Mr. Priddy, we’re sorry you’re sick and hope you’ll soon be well. We chipped in for those and hope you’ll like ’em, please.”

When they had left the room, the nurse opened the bag and discovered one half-dozen maximum-ripened bananas.

But graduation! Should I be in the hospital while my classmates enjoyed the festivities, the sobering joys, the inspiration of that event? The doctor, who with his trail of a clinic examined me each morning, had been given a word by the President, for though a stern man in appearance and very blunt in speech, he would turn, half fiercely, in mock ferocity to my nurse and say,

“This young man _must_ be ready for the sixth of June. Remember, he is not to be in this place on that day!”

Though he never smiled as he said this; yet because he said it I imagined him as the best friend I had ever called friend, for the sixth of June was the day of graduation!

From the fragments of news which came to me, day by day, I knew that the Seminary was shaping itself for the graduation exercises. The oral examinations had been held; the visiting alumni had met for their annual meeting; the reception, in one of the professors’ homes, had been given; and on the morrow, in the evening, my classmates would stand before the pulpit in the brick church while the President handed them their diplomas.

Graduation morning found me shaved, expectant and nervous, sitting at one of the windows watching a little girl cruelly strip a tiny sapling of its first glorious flowers. Suddenly the nurse came into the room, with a knowing smile, and said that there was a stranger to see me!

There followed the scrape of a foot along the rubber-carpeted corridor and into the room, dressed in demure black, came the missionary! She had followed the leading of her heart and had come down to cheer me on for graduation, for a strange dream had come to her the night I had been smitten down, a dream that came before any news of my illness had reached her, in which some spirit of warning had whispered that I was suffering, in danger of my life! Then the mail had brought her the truth, and there she stood before me to share the honors of the day sympathetically with me.

By ten o’clock two classmates rattled into the hospital yard in a carriage; came into my room, their arms loaded with my best clothes.

“You’ve got to graduate with us!” they exclaimed. “We’ve been together through the years, and we can’t afford to have the line broken now!”

One half hour later, supported by them, I was placed in the carriage and carried triumphantly to my room in the dormitory, where I was to remain quiet and patient until evening, when I should go down to the brick church for my diploma!

From the lofty height of my dormitory window I could look down on the house-tops of the city and see the hazy hills far, far against the distant sky-lines. I could also look down between the veil of elm leaves and see the processions of visitors and the hurrying forms of my classmates, as they passed over the tar walk, under the shady arch of the trees towards the gymnasium, where a banquet was to be served in honor of my class.

There was a clatter outside my door, and the classmate who had been chosen to deliver the speech for us in the gymnasium appeared in my doorway with a hearty,

“How do I look, Priddy?”

No groom ever did better with a frock coat, a white, flowered vest, a brilliant tie, and neatly combed hair, and I told him so. He then left me for the momentous occasion in which he was to figure after dinner, when he would stand up at the head of all the tables, strike his pose, and in his best manner--with an incidental throwing back of his frock coat to display his grand white vest--give the felicitations, the thanks, the hopes, and ideals of our class.

So I sat apart from the revelry of the day, with a beating, thankful heart, waiting for the arrival of evening. After supper a student came into the room, fitted me into the best collar that I had, fastened the groomish, white silk tie skilfully about it, put the golden links into my new cuffs, and then helped me insert myself into my new frock coat!

“There,” he cried, stroking the front of my coat and then standing back for the effect, “I think you are ready to be escorted down to the church by the missionary; she will meet you in the reception room. Good luck to you, Priddy!”

I was so faint that I walked through the great congregation of visitors and friends as through a blur. I took my seat in the front of the church with my classmates and saw only the array of palms and flowers on the communion table. I needed to marshal every ounce of nerve and strength in order to get through the service without accident. A terrible fear rushed into my heart, as my head kept whirling like a top and leaving me exhausted, a fear that I should tumble from my seat and spoil the exercises.

One after another of my classmates crowded past me, ascended to the pulpit, and delivered his speech. Next my name on the program, and the subject of the speech on which I never wrote, was a star, followed by the note: “Excused on account of illness.”

After the addresses, the President came down from the pulpit throne and we stood lined up before him, with the vast audience at our backs. I could not listen to the words of parting that our mentor gave us, for I felt every minute that I should tumble back like a stricken ninepin; bowled over by my insufficient strength. Sweeps of pain, of cold and heat went through me like differing winds. Slowly, ever so slowly, the diplomas were handed us, seeming to take a day or more, and every minute I felt like stopping the solemn service and asking to be allowed to go back to my seat.

Finally the last of the diplomas were given, we turned our faces to the congregation, walked nervously back to our seats, and waited for the exercises to be concluded.

The organ thundered its exultant recessional, the people crowded into the aisles and intercepted us as we struggled through, seeking out sweethearts, friends, parents, whose congratulation we sought first. The missionary was waiting for me near an exit door, anxious for me, as I saw by her face. I had just shown her my diploma, with its blue silken bow, when suddenly the Dean tapped me on the shoulder and politely requested my diploma, saying,

“You may have it again, Mr. Priddy, after you have completed your deferred examinations!”

_Chapter XXXII. How, Though I was Ready for Service, I was Forestalled by a New Trouble, and the Very Interesting Plan Which Came Out of it_

Then the reward of the years came to me: I had my whole time to give to my parish, I had my home in the parsonage and a wife--the “brown-haired young woman”--to preside over it. Though Evangelical University had nurtured narrow, dogmatic, and discontented versions of faith in me, and though the first months of instruction in the Seminary had witnessed the destruction of these versions of faith, finally had come the larger world of faith, without narrow bounds, with deeper reaches and a much brighter sky. Like Burner, I had been called upon to pass through skeptical valleys, and to climb over high walls which bruised the spirit, but it was only to climb to the top of a lofty faith, at last, in which I seemed to behold the world of men, spite of their common sins, tending towards the central place--God’s garden. I felt that I could go into the pulpit and preach on themes, which instead of arousing the hostility of men, as the doctrine of Evangelical University seemed destined to do, would by their breadth, optimism, and freedom from Phariseeism win the repentant consent of men. I had gone into the Seminary tutored by Evangelical University to be afraid to let the sun shine on religion’s chief doctrines, I had come from the Seminary believing that the flood of light intensified the beauty of religion. So, at last, I had the opportunity of testing on community life this doctrine which comforted me with an inexpressible comfort. I bent to my work, with my wife at my elbow, as proud of my chance as any king called suddenly from obscurity to a kingdom.

I occupied a study whose front window overlooked the trees and gave me an excellent view of the sailing ships and steamers which dotted the bay. I had my typewriter in one corner, my desk in the centre of the room, and an abundant supply of manuscript paper on which I intended writing years and years of sermons for that parish.

One day, in spring, my wife insisted that I consult a specialist about a throat affliction which had been interfering with my parish duties. I sought one out and had him make a thorough examination of me. Gravely he plied his tools and searched my throat, and gravely he announced,

“You will have to bring your pastoral work to an end, sir. Your throat will have to be cared for. You must go, immediately, to a dry climate, among the high hills, and use your throat for a year or two with great economy. That is all. There is no better remedy.”

I gazed on him with startled eyes.

“But I’ve just got settled down,” I insisted. “I have no money saved. I have just married. Is there no other remedy?”

“None,” he replied, “I am sorry to say. You will have to do as I prescribe or lose your voice altogether. It is very serious.”

Late that afternoon I appeared before my wife. She had been planting some old-fashioned flowers in the garden. She saw by my downcast countenance that I had bad news.

“What has he told you?” she enquired. “Don’t quibble with me, please!”

“We’ll have to say good-bye to this place,” I began, miserably. “It’s all at an end: this fine dream!”

“Have to leave?” she echoed, faintly. “Is that it?”

Then I reported to her what the specialist had told me.

“And we’ve planted the garden!” I concluded. “We shan’t be able to stay here long enough to reap it!”

There followed some moments of silence, during which the full shock of the news had time to hurt her, and then she proved herself to be one in that sisterhood of wives who in proposing a comfortable escape from a domestic difficulty bravely commit themselves to hardships: for she said, with a smile,

“There, now, this will give you a chance to get to college!”

I looked at her with great astonishment.

“But we cannot afford to go to college,” I protested.

“Oh, can’t we?” she smiled. “Well, I suppose it may be possible for you to get a little church to supply near a college, and I will stay at home through the week, keeping an eye on the parish work while you study for your degree.”

“I had never thought of that!”

“You will have to be idle if you go to a parish, you might as well use your time in getting a college degree,” she insisted.

In two weeks’ time I had written to the Dean of an old New England college, of great reputation, and, on the strength of my seminary study, was informed that I should be eligible to enter the junior class at the college the following fall. With that matter settled, I soon learned that I might supply a country church, some miles from the college, and let my wife occupy the parsonage. The financial end of college thus concluded, I resigned from the church: the church in which all the sentimental ties of student days, ordination, and marriage were merged.

An old seaman came and boxed my household goods, and as he worked, tried to blunt the sting of the task by reciting to me in great detail, how Moses, after becoming the wisest man among the Egyptians, likewise became the greatest war general of his time.

“How is that?” I asked.

“Well, you see,” said the seaman, “the ’Gyptians was allus goin’ over the sands of the desert to battle, and the sands of the desert was filled with biting snakes, and the men died by whole companies from the glare of the sun, so Moses, he invented some red umbrellas and give one to every soldier and took ’em onto the blazing, snake-ridden floor of the desert. Result was, when the snakes seen the glaring umbrellas they was scart off, and the men was covered from the hot blaze of the sun, and went into other lands and won big victories under that same Moses!”

“Where did you learn that?” I asked, in great curiosity.

He mumbled the name of some strange-sounding history, and then returned to his work, for which I was paying him twenty cents an hour. That legend had cost me fifteen cents; it had taken him a full three-quarters of an hour to recount it with its frills and the many interjections.

Then my wife and I, feeling like the first man and woman leaving Eden, bade a tearful good-bye to the house, to the parish, and went forth to a new educational adventure, one that would have its own peculiar hardships, pain, and pleasures.

_Chapter XXXIII. Of a Village where Locomotive Whistles Sounded like Lingering Music: of the Esthetic Possibilities in a College Catalogue: of a Journey over the Hills to the College where we find, besides a Wonderful Array of Structures, a Large Room and the Junior with his Barnful of Furniture_

To a bird the north New England hill country whither our adventure took us might have resembled in shape a crumpled pie crust. In one of the depressions lay our new parish: the horizons high and lifted up by reason of the hills which girt it closely about. All the exits from the village were over roads that sloped upward. Only the river had an even course as its shallow body bruised itself in rushing over the sharp, white rocks which tried to hold it back.

The village was composed of groups of neatly painted cottages branching from an elm-shaded green around which stood the town buildings: the drab-painted pillared church, the post-office and general store, the glaring red brick townhouse, the mill-like school building, the parsonage, the doctor’s residence, the postmaster’s house, and the farm of the first select-man.

The two fine contributions to the national reputation that a majority of our parishioners were sending into the markets, were golden bars of butter and finely-fed beef. Very quietly the people were giving themselves to these tasks, having but little touch with the great world outside.

It was difficult for me, in the midst of such rustic peace and isolated civilization, to realize that twelve miles back of the hills lay a famous college whose traditions had gone out into every part of the country during the century and a half of its existence. Its name had been reverently spoken in so far away a place as Evangelical University. The history of the United States cannot be written without mention and eulogy of some of its noted graduates. During those July days, while we were establishing our household goods in the parsonage, I caught myself sniffing the east wind, as if eager to slake my curiosity by catching the flavor of the college. My enthusiasm was unbounded over the possibility of at last attaining unto a college education: the trade-mark of American culture. My wife and I had promised ourselves to drive over the hills as soon as the house had been established, so that together we might have our first view of the institution and that I might confer with the dean and arrange my schedule of studies for the first term. I waited impatiently for that day to come.

Meanwhile, during the lulls in house settling, I took the college catalogue and selected a course of studies. It was an enticing feast before which I sat: I felt like a lad having to choose from fifteen nectar flavors of ice cream, only the courses of study from which I had the privilege of choosing went into the hundreds. Almost every theme of my desire was spread before me; explorations into literature, social life, fine arts, science, language, and economics. Old yearnings could be abundantly gratified at last: a formidable list of professors and a more formidable list of studies awaited my option. Evangelical University had given me the foundations of an education, the Seminary had given me the technical knowledge of my profession, at last I had come to the studies that should broaden my outlook, extend my habits of thought beyond the narrow groove of my vocation, and link me to the great world-thought. I put down Italian so that at last I might, with my own ears, hear Dante speak to me through his euphonious and inspired Cantos, and I chose a course in which Goethe should at last be met face to face. I also determined to test my theology in a science course to find out for myself if God and the forces of Nature were actually engaged in undying warfare. I chose, also, a course in composition, which had in it all the lure towards authorship and the fascination of literary creation. My technical studies in the Seminary had prepared me to secure from the college the highest inspiration I should ever receive from books.

Early in the month of August, my wife and I started from the village in a buggy for a drive over the hill roads to the college. My wife reminded me, during the drive, of the strangeness of the situation: of the fact that five years previously she had received her degree from her _alma mater_ and that she was now on the way to witness the matriculation of her husband. Midway on the route we drove through an abandoned village, past a once commodious church, a mill, and several houses, all storm bent and in forsaken ruin. We rode along sand-rutted highways which seemed to take us farther and farther away from living creatures. We passed acres and acres of stumps showing where the axes and saws of woodsmen had left a permanent scar in the forestry of the back-roads. Then we emerged on the first street of a quaint, slumberous town whose green and drab-shuttered white houses hid demurely behind screens of elm and of maple. On the outskirts of this village we found ourselves on a sandy plain which sloped down towards a wide river. On the opposite bank, set like gleaming red and white flowers in a bed of green, were towers, windows, houses, chimneys: acres of them, a mile distant, scattered over a narrow elevated plain behind which rolled hills far to the North, to the East and to the South, their sky-lines lost in clouds.

“It’s the college!” I exclaimed, dropping the reins for further, excited contemplation. The patches of red and the hundreds of gleaming, sun-blazing windows, were dormitories and academic halls. The white blotches were innumerable houses surrounding the college buildings. One had to pick them out from the lavish clusters of shade trees whose leaves left cool, dark shadows on the buildings.

Fifteen minutes later our horse had dragged us toilsomely up a steep roadway on either side of which were a few scattered houses, the outposts of the college town, and brought us right into the midst of the college campus itself, a very green oasis surrounded by a hollow square of college structures. Yes, the Fence was there, a double line of it with the grass worn off where Seniors’ sacred feet had rubbed! just as in my boyish speculations I had always conceived a college with its Fence. Very near the green, too, lay a solid stone sarcophagus of a drinking fountain: just the sort which, in my boyish speculations and boyish reading, I had seen used for the baths of recalcitrant Freshmen and too obtrusive Sophomores. Over on the north side a snow-white meeting-house fronted us with a stiff, proud chest, and with its hexagonal bell-tower rising above the roof like the smoke-stack of a railway engine, made one expect to see it start puffing forward over the campus, with a very tiny, Greek-pillared vestry accompanying it, like a colt engine, destined, sometime later, perhaps, to grow into a meeting-house, like its companion. Across the street from where we had entered stood a brick tavern, under whose canopy an old coach waited equipped with glass doors, outside seats, and with thick leather straps to keep the pliant springs from sending the body of the coach leaping off the wheels at the “thank-you-ma’ams.” To the left we discovered a huge square brick structure with a fenced-in roof faced by a spacious walled-in porch, with pillar-supported roof which, we learned, was the combined college club and commons.

Screened by the arching trees and massed in companies of twos and threes, fives and sixes, were recitation halls, a Renaissance museum, a stone chapel, a power house, numerous dormitories, a snow-white observatory, a gymnasium, and last, a stone tower crowning a knoll and dominating the campus.

The dean gave me my papers, approved my courses of studies, and then sent my wife and me on an inspection of available dormitory rooms, for I should have to reside at the college six days out of seven.

After the penury of Evangelical University and the quaint compactness of the Seminary, the broad acres, costly, comfortable buildings and lavish size of the college gripped my imagination. We threaded our way past a set of dormitories, through a wooded road, and entered a rustic park where Commencement festivities were held every June. We passed sedate rows of professorial residences fronted by hedges and smooth-clipped lawns. Over to the south we viewed a fenced-in athletic field; a mass of green with ovals and straightaways of black cinders, and with bleachers and a grandstand at one end: the place where, fully as much as in the college buildings, the culture of youth went on: the culture of health, of muscular skill, and of moral temper.

A janitor--a young man with a broad forehead and gentle ways--extracted a bunch of keys and showed us into a very old dormitory where were single rooms, double rooms, quadruple and sextuple rooms; according to taste, but no room which met with my approval, especially when the dormitory bore such a sinister name as Demon Cottage, a corruption of Damon Cottage. The janitor, who turned out to be, himself, a graduate of the college, on learning that I was an aspirant for the ministry, promptly advised me to examine a room in the Christian Association building. This we did, and when he had guided my wife and me up three flights of stairs and thrown open the door of a massive, square room, with shop windows for light, I said,

“Isn’t this the college Socialistic Hall, or the band practise chamber?”

“No, this is merely a double, dormitory room,” he admitted. “Sixty dollars a year for each occupant with an extra bedroom over there and an enormous storeroom through that door.”

“Well,” I concluded, after some discussion, “a flat-full of furniture would hardly furnish the center of the room, but there’s sure to be a good circulation of air, and that is important. I think I’d better take it.”

When we returned to the campus we discovered a group of canvas-clad students punting a football while a group of Freshmen, with eyes bulging out of their heads, looked on in worshipful wonder, for Ellis, Barton, and Chipman, three of the Varsity team, were in the advance guard of athletes engaged in early practise.

The janitor had sent us to “Durritt’s Barn” where, he informed us, we should be able to pick up a team load of dormitory furniture at second-hand for very little money. “Durritt’s Barn” was actually a barn attached to a pleasant little house which had been transformed, by a very energetic Junior, into a second-hand furniture store. The Junior, whose name I learned was Garden, presented himself from behind a bewildering mass of dusty rugs, topsy-turvy mission chairs, and sectional book shelves, and picked his way to us through a narrow aisle made by massed heaps of bedsteads, mattresses, chiffoniers, tables, and desks. When we expressed amazement at his business audacity in having such a mass of second-hand furnishings on his hands, he informed us that we had not seen it all and then he led us up a stairway to the loft where we discovered another heaped up mass of material.

“I shall have it all sold by the time college has opened,” said the Junior. “In fact, I shall not have enough for the demand.”

“Where do you get the furniture?” demanded my wife.

“From the Seniors,” replied Garden. “They sell it for next to nothing during Commencement. It is a profitable business--while it lasts. It gives me an excellent chance for earning my way through the college. Now, how would that iron bedstead suit you, for your room, Mr. Priddy, and that felt mattress, which goes with it: three dollars for the whole?”

After informing him that he did not have in his stock a rug expansive enough to cover the floor of my spacious apartment in Association Hall, we compromised on a very limp, red carpet rug which would resemble a bandanna handkerchief when spread out on my room floor, but which was actually the broadest floor covering I could purchase. A half hour later I paid twelve dollars and a quarter for the bed, the rug, a chair, a small book shelf, and a tied-together chiffonier with most of its brass handles missing.

After having left the moving of the furniture in the hands of Garden, my wife and I were once more driving over those lonesome, sandy, rutted roads, in the midst of the profound silences of remote civilization. Again we passed through the deserted village. Two hours later we were back in the parsonage ready, next, to pack my trunk preparatory to the opening of college.

_Chapter XXXIV. My Wife Packs me off to College. The Senior and I Stop at a Rock for a Drink, Meet the Advance Guard of Students, Plunge into a Bedlam, and Witness the Labors of the Freshmen. The Finger-study of Quarles and my Apology Given to the Retired Medical Man who was Specializing in Hens_

“Here I am, in our honeymoon year, packing you off to college,” commented my wife, as she folded some towels and handed them to me to put in my trunk. “It takes me back to the day when my mother did it for me.”

“And you’re to have the hard end of the business,” I replied, “staying in this house alone and keeping an eye on the parish. Not much of a honeymoon to that through the long, winter days, while I am in the swirl of college events, with all the fellowship one can desire.”

“But there’ll be holidays and Saturdays at home, for you,” she answered. “I shall see you once a week at least, for you will have to preach here every Sunday. We’re working together, now,” she added, quietly. “If there’s any suffering, any hardship, any self-denial involved, I am willing to undergo it, else I would not have married you!”

In her voice ran an undertone of tragic feeling and for the first time I began dimly to realize, in the midst of my own opportunity for a college education, that in this little home, back over the hills, my wife would be waiting, and waiting, through the long hours of the day and night, for the two years’ study to be at an end: the study which would break up our home and separate us during the first days of our married life. I vowed then to give it all up: to plunge into the pastoral work: to send word to the college dean that he must not expect me.

“No, not that: not that!” protested my wife. “It is your chance, take it!”