This spirit of thoroughness and critical honesty was needed during the

second year, for we were constructing a personal faith: a task more

serious than the mere acquisition of historic facts or encyclopædic

knowledge. But the teachers were patient, kindly, and watched us let

conservative and traditional habits of mind go, not in any spirit

of intolerance. There were many times, that year, when I found

myself almost duplicating Burner’s misery, by sitting in my room

and wondering, after I had let go my traditional habits of thought

about God and the Bible, what I should do without faith. But as one

conception went, another, larger conception came, and I found a

nobler faith than I ever had before. The self-distrust and miserable

vacancy of doubt, were, as I had blunderingly told Burner, mere phases

towards a positive faith. One winter morning, after a night of mental

struggle, during which I suffered fully as much as I had ever suffered

from any physical hardship, I went out on the campus to walk about in

the crisp air. The students had just gone into the chapel for morning

prayers. I stopped under the windows and heard the drone of the parlor

organ. Then, on the quietness of the morning, the manly melody came

to my ears: a hymn resonant with a man’s faith, and bringing peace

to my doubts. “Oh, Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” they were singing,

a monkish, monastic tinge to it, coming from male throats,--only

the tenor was too boyish for a monk, too thrillingly rampant in its

ambitious soaring after God over the high notes. But it soothed me and

I went in the strength of that hymn for many days.

_Chapter XXVII. The Wonderful Summer on the Pleasure Island_

My next opportunity of earning money for my education came in a call to

preach on Sundays in a little church sixty miles from the Seminary at a

fashionable summer resort. The compensation to be ten dollars a week:

compensation for three days’ absence from the Seminary, one hundred

and twenty miles of travel and expenses, and the nervous exertion of

preaching twice and teaching a Sunday-school class, not excluding

pastoral work whenever opportunity should offer!

These weekly journeys began when I arose on Saturday morning at five

o’clock, drank a hastily prepared cup of cocoa, and hurried off to

the station for the six o’clock train. Then the train would start on

its way through the snowdrifts, puffing and gasping down white aisles

through rows of stiff, stately pines whose hands held puffy clouds of

snow, and then followed a slow passage through miles of birches bending

low under the weight of wet snow like robed saints humbled by too

great a weight of glory. The railway trip was followed by a steamer

journey of eight miles through a heavy, sad sea which never seemed to

have any light in it, and in whose icy surface pretty grey and mottled

gulls were not afraid to dip their palpitating breasts. The steamer put

me ashore on an island whose centre was loaded with a serried row of

little mountains. At the landing I found a stage and drove for eight

miles over the island to my parish. The stage horse rushed us down

dipping roads that threaded between precipitous mountain sides, whose

summits were desert rocks and at whose feet had crumbled cliff after

cliff of red rock, spread out like a rusty iron yard. Then the road

became a climb until some highlands were attained and we sped through

a little fishing village which nestled close to a mysterious, secluded

cove, guarded by stern, fretted cliffs, a place where Stevenson would

have had a cave of smugglers or the anchorage of a rakish pirate craft.

Then came a turn in the road, where, behind a fringe of thick, old gold

birches and in the midst of some dead oak stumps, nature had placed a

cathedral pile of gigantic slabs of stone, one on another, as if to

show to man what the angels of strength could do once they started to

build with stone. Next followed a bewildering ride over a spiral road

up a steep hill on which stood aristocratic summer homes. At a lookout

where the road took a sudden dip, one saw the cold ocean far down

below with its heavy, listless breakers pounding wearily against the

iron cliffs, as if saying, “Why do the poets insist on our ceaselessly

trying to shatter this cliff? I wish they would let us rest through

the winter, till the summer visitors come: then I will pound like

Vulcan’s hammer to please them!” In the distance, little dismal islands

stood in the sea like burnt dumplings in gravy. Over them the gulls

were screaming and wailing, adding to the solitude and the winter’s

dreariness. Then the stage slanted down the hill and after a long,

twisting ride drew up before the village post-office, where I met my

host and was duly welcomed as the new minister.

Back and forth, week after week, returning to the Seminary on Monday

evenings, I accomplished my journeys faithfully. Each week besides

my studies I had to plan for the church. There was little time for

idleness, for the hours of recreation were taken up in travel. On these

trips I took a book and tried to have it read on my return.

But my reward was near at hand. The summer arrived, and with it

an inflow of wealth, honor, and leisure to my parish. A wonderful

transformation came over the island--the Pleasure Island. Boards were

unscrewed from cottage windows. The dead grass gave way to green

carpets. Lifeless sticks budded with colored foliage. The dead sea

and the listless waves became animated with restless energy. The

sun kissed the roads into smoothness and lined the highways with

flowers. Fresh painted steamers, with flying banners, whistled into the

wharves and unloaded crowds of visitors. Steam yachts lay at anchor

in the cove. The white wings of yawls and catboats were dipping in

the breeze. The mountain paths had been re-charted and were filled

with adventurers. The pine groves and the quiet cliffs lured tired

men and women to their restful silences. Trout fishers rubbed oil of

camphor over their faces to restrain the ambitious stings of flies

and mosquitoes, and sought the brook pools where Walton’s classic

trout waited to be played with. My little rustic church became filled

with city people, who not only sat in the pews, but sang in the

choir, decorated the pulpit with flowers and grasses, and served on

responsible committees.

Then, too, my rest and opportunity came, for we had a list of

distinguished clergymen and professors who were to occupy my pulpit

every Sunday morning, for the resort was very rich in clerical talent

of a willing and gracious sort. We had so much professional talent

indeed, that one morning near the post-office I beheld two bishops,

two university presidents, two professors, and a world-famous author

standing on less than two square yards of ground!

We left the doors and the windows of the church open while the noted

men preached, and their voices had to vie with the song birds who

perched on the waving trees outside the windows. The sea tang blew

across the church, the sweetest of summer incense.

I had little enough to do, for the people were too busy with pleasure

to be at home: they wanted me to sit on the cliffs with books and take

a rest--on a salary.

But there came calls to preach on some of the outlying islands to which

I was carried on different Sunday afternoons in a launch.

Then they all left us, tanned, virile, rested: the whole community

took itself to the decks of the island steamers and was carried to the

trains. The tennis courts were closed. The shutters were fastened over

the display windows of the flower stand. Many pews were empty in my

little, rustic church. The flowers and shrubs were bedded in straw.

Soon the snow and frost and bleakness of winter would spread over the

island. My second pastorate ended, too, for I had received a call to

supply a larger church much nearer to the Seminary, a church where I

intended to preach after my graduation from the Seminary.

_Chapter XXVIII. How a Parsonage Suggests a Wife. The Convincing

Revelations of a Phrenologist Who Examined the Students’ Bumps_

On the return to the Seminary, to enter upon my senior year, the first

men I missed were Burner and Tucker, who had graduated the previous

summer. Burner wrote me a very interesting letter from the precincts of

a prominent New England university to the effect that he was a member

of the junior class of that institution, that on Sundays he preached

in a very delightful country town; that he was having a rich feast in

college fare; the courses in animal psychology, metaphysics, especially

in relation to the fundamentals of faith, holding the fullest

fascination for him. Tucker, able at last to do a preacher’s work, not

only to his own personal taste, but also to the gratification of his

parish, was giving himself, sacrificially, to the work of dignifying

the life of the people who had called him. He wrote me that he felt

his special work in life to have two phases to it: that he should

remain unmarried in order that, like a monk, he could do God’s work

with singleness of purpose, and that he should go only to struggling,

discouraged parishes where the small salaries and the hardships formed

a sufficient missionary challenge: parishes in which he should labor

until they were transformed and able finally to pay a salary on which

a permanent, married man could settle among them and give them the

fullest, freest service.

“I am setting myself,” concluded Tucker, “to be a mortgage-lifter,

parsonage-getter, and salary-raiser for other ministers who are to

follow me!”

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!”

As I descended from my pulpit the following Sunday morning, I was

introduced to a quiet youth who was recommended to me as a Senior in

the college. That afternoon my new acquaintance came down to the

parsonage and willingly permitted me, in my curiosity, to question

him concerning the traditions, the customs, and the personnel of the

college. I asked him some very trivial and laughable questions, I

remember, because, at the time, I had some very curious and perhaps too

exalted notions concerning colleges, especially colleges of the high

standard of the one in which I had just matriculated and to which I was

to journey on the morrow.

After our conversation, the Senior promised to call for me next day and

escort me to the college: a proffer which I was glad to accept.

That September Monday morning was a very pleasant one in the Northern

country. The maple groves on the hill slopes made one think that God

had let fall his color pots, for the leaves of the trees flamed with

reds, with yellows, and with blacks. The mail wagon drove up to the

parsonage door and collected myself, the Senior, and my trunk. My wife

stood at the door telling me not to forget this and that, with true

motherly solicitude. Then, with a dash through the dust, the wagon

wheeled us on our way across the river to the train that should carry

us to within four miles of college.

The Senior said, as we changed at a junction,

“The train that will get us to college does not go for some hours. Are

you fit for a four-mile walk? We can eat lunch on the way. I have some

in my suit-case.”

I agreed that I was ready for the walk, so we left the town precincts

by walking through a lumber yard.

Our travel took us over a cinder path between the ties and switch rods

of a railroad. At the right, far below us, flowed a very wide and swift

river, whose surface twinkled through the shields of pine and white

birch which lined the bluff. Here we met several young men walking

slowly and engaged in earnest conversation.

“Those are students!” the Senior whispered, “out for a walk.”

When some mill whistles at a remote distance announced the noon hour,

the Senior conducted me to a grove of stiff, tall pines where on the

brown, fragrant needles he spread a lunch of sandwiches, jelly, and

pears.

Then we took up the walk again, passing on into the wilderness of trees

and rushing river. At a turn in the track we came to a high cliff whose

outer surface was stained with moss and glistened with dampness. The

Senior stopped before a niche out of whose cool interior spouted a

stream of ice-cold water, bringing to mind the rock which Moses struck

with his wand and which slaked the thirst of the children of Israel.

“Nearly every student who passes this way,” the Senior announced, “gets

a drink of this water.”

Ten minutes later we walked into the station and I was amazed at the

heaps of trunks that covered the platform. Drays were doing their

best to reduce the pile by carting them away in enormous loads. As

we made our way around the trunks there dashed into the station one

of the coaches I had seen near the tavern on my previous visit; this

time topped by a group of healthy-faced, shouting students, wearing

tan shoes, flannel trousers, and flapping caps such as clowns, in the

circus rings, wear with such comical effect. This coach was quickly

followed by another, similarly loaded with students come down to greet

the arrival of classmates and friends.

At last I was able to realize the task that was on my hands if I were

to fit into the college life, for scores of students passed us or

trailed after us as the Senior and I walked up the hill. How should

I ever succeed in remembering their names, in entering into the

acquaintance of a small number of all those students? And the trains

were bringing more!

On top of the hill, just before entering the campus, some fraternity

houses, lavishly appointed, had their verandahs filled with students,

singing snatches of songs and bantering one another. Then there flashed

into view again, the campus and the business street, only on this

occasion it was a far different campus and a very different business

street from what I had seen on my previous visit. The sidewalks were

thronged with students, some leaning against shop windows, others

sitting on steps, while others roamed along engaged in conversation.

On the campus, keeping to the paths, were groups of Freshmen walking

timidly enough past Sophomores in sweaters and negligee attire and past

Seniors in graver dress and mien. On the front lawn of a dormitory four

neatly-dressed youths were beating rugs and as their energetic actions

continued they were half smothered in the clouds of dust.

“I should imagine that they would don rougher clothes while they dust

rugs,” I commented to the Senior.

My companion smiled, knowingly,

“They have no chance to change clothes,” he replied. “They are Freshmen

which some of the upper-classmen have picked up from the campus and

compelled to do that work. It will be the Freshmen’s turn, next year,

however, so that it isn’t much of an imposition. Now you’ll see some

fun. Watch that football man with the sweater!”

The football man in the sweater had come out of the dormitory and had

gone over to the Freshman who was working more energetically than his

fellows, and said to him,

“Say, Freshie, what’re you sleeping on the job like that for, eh? Do

you want the Sophs. to give you a black mark so soon?”

He glared with mock savagery at the bewildered Freshman, who replied,

“Please sir, I am working very hard, sir!”

“If you call that work, then,” stormed the football man, “I wonder what

you do when you loaf? Die probably, eh?”

“I thought, sir--” persisted the Freshman, but he was cut short by the

football man who said,

“Just carry that up to my room, put it straight, set the furniture in

place, and then go to work and copy those marked extracts from the

coach’s note-book which you’ll find on the desk. Hurry and have it done

in two hours’ time!”

As the football man ended those savage orders, he turned away with an

amused smile and as he came towards us he winked and said to the Senior,

“That young cuss’s got the making of a fine kid in him, even if he is

the son of a several hundred thousand dollar Senator. Just watch him

make the dust fly! Ain’t he a peacherino, though!”

The Senior informed me, after the football man had strolled away, that

the fagging was in full force just then and that the Freshmen took

it in good humor, and, in fact, would have considered themselves not

actually at college had that feature been omitted.

The different noises that filled the air made a Babel. From dormitory

windows came shouts, cornet practise, and various moanings which, at a

quieter time, would have been differentiated as vocal trios and duets.

Down the business street, from the upper floors where some of the

fraternities had rooms, the sounds of clanging piano rag-time tried

to merge with explosive bellowings of happy, singing fraternity men.

On the College Club porch a jostling crowd of students could be seen,

shaking hands, telling summer experiences, and knocking chairs about

in the anxiety to get at one another. The shop windows were gay with

college banners, souvenirs, books, picture cards, college photographs,

and sporting goods.

I found the furniture I had purchased from Garden heaped before my door

and a half hour later I had it scattered lonesomely over the floor

of my large room. From my open window I could look down on the stir

of life on the campus. Night deepened, and with it came an increase,

rather than a quieting of the noises, as if Youth were bound to have

one last, gleesome frolic before the sedate masters of Books curbed

their liberties. In the darkness of the night, sitting at the window,

exactly as I had done at Evangelical University six years previously,

I had an alien feeling as I listened to the sounds which soared up to

my ears from the gloom below. Demon yells, demon howls of acute misery,

throbbings of mandolin strings, the hoarse tooting of a fish horn, a

piercing falsetto voice under my window trying to sing,

“O, O, O! Dear, dear old days, love!”

the clanging of a hand bell and intermittent revolver shots. These were

only a few of all the riot of sounds spreading through the night air,

over the campus and bursting out of the dormitory windows on every side

of me. While I sat wondering how a hundred or so of faculty could ever

bring seriousness out of such a chaos of youthful energy, I heard a

chug underneath my window as a truckman hurled a trunk to the sidewalk:

my trunk. Immediately I went on the campus, discovered two Freshmen,

and with all the abandon of a Junior that I could muster for the

occasion, I coolly invited them to assist me in carrying the heavily

loaded trunk up the three flights of stairs. So conformed to the

fagging custom were the Freshmen, that when one of them unfortunately

sliced his finger on a loose nail and I commiserated him on it, he

said, keeping his grip on the trunk, meanwhile,

“Nothing at all, sir. Nothing at all.”

Next morning the trio of bell chimes, in the tower of the college

chapel, hurled clanging, throbbing scales-of-three over the quiet

campus. Immediately from the doorways of dormitories, boarding clubs,

and the Commons, appeared chatting groups of students who took the

paths across the campus towards the first chapel service. From the

North, the South, the East and the West they hurried; hundreds and

hundreds of well-dressed youths, arm in arm or four and five abreast as

they walked.

The choir, transepts and gallery were soon crowded, almost to

suffocation. The morning sun in trying to break through the windows

into the dimness merely glorified the pictured saints, and prophets,

shepherds and sheep. The gowned organist played a part of the grand

finale of The Pilgrim’s Chorus. The gowned figure of the President

arose and stood silent a second while a wave of reverent stillness

swept through the chapel. Scripture followed hymn, and a simple

prayer was followed by a general confession. Then the organ burst

into a triumphant recessional, and the students noisily crowded down

the aisles into the open air. The day’s work was begun, having had

invoked on it the blessing from the Author of all Truth, and the

Creator of that World which throughout the days and years, has had such

fascination for students and professors, of Science, of Art and Faith.

In the confusion of the multitude of students, most of them strangers

to me, I felt the futility of my social ambitions. In Evangelical

University and in the theological seminary I had been in the midst

of small groups of students, whose names, characteristics and

acquaintance could be compassed in a few short weeks. But the vast

procession of young men which blackened the greensward of the campus

that morning dismayed me. It seemed that mere hand-shaking and saying

to each individual member of it, “I am glad to know you!” would demand

months and months of time. It was a new experience, too, after the

simple democracy in my previous schools, to have those who were my

classmates and college associates, pass me without a word of morning

greeting, without a lift of the eyes.

But that was only the first day!

The second morning, as I sat in the chapel, I chanced to have my

attention attracted by a curious fingering of paper. It was the student

next to me who had some blank sheets of paper in his hands which he

shuffled intermittently and over which he kept passing the ball of his

forefinger. The organ had not ceased its prelude, and the students

had not ceased entering the chapel, so I paid a stricter attention to

the strange recreation of my companion. Though he shuffled his blank

papers with great skill and fingered their surfaces with scientific

regularity, his eyes--wide, staring ones,--were kept fixed on the

President’s pulpit--never once did they turn on my inquisitiveness or

towards the papers.

One of the students then slipped by me and took a vacant seat next to

this shuffler of papers. As soon as he was seated, however, he bent

forward and said, to me,

“Your name’s Priddy, isn’t it? I’m Sanderson, the monitor who keeps the

attendance of this section. By the way, have you met Quarles? Quarles,”

he said to the student who was shuffling the papers, “meet Priddy, your

classmate!” Quarles, without taking his eyes from their fixed stare on

the President’s pulpit, extended me his hand, and said, in a very quiet

voice,

“I’m glad to meet you, Priddy! I’m blind, as you probably know.”

I expressed my amazement that he should be in college.

“Oh,” Sanderson exclaimed, “it doesn’t seem to bother him any. I notice

that he’s getting on for Phi Beta Kappa. He makes us hump!”

“Then you are able to take the regular studies!” I gasped.

“Yes,” said Quarles, “the regular studies!”

“Of course,” I went on, “you omit mathematics, languages, and such

things!”

“Why should I, Priddy?” asked Quarles turning toward me his

expressionless eyes.

“Well, I really don’t see how you can manage--those subjects,” I

explained.

“He manages all right,” interrupted Sanderson, “why, Priddy, he’s taken

nineties in calculus, French and German and Greek, and is right there

when it comes to such graft courses, as philosophy and English! Oh,

you don’t need to pity him: rather pity me, who with my eyesight, am

hardly able to pull through Fine Arts One!”

Quarles then explained to me how, before taking his courses, he had a

student read to him the complete text which he translated into Braille

with his blind-writing apparatus, on sheets of paper. He also used the

same instrument, almost as quickly as we, with our sight, would use our

pencils in the professor’s lectures. The leaves he had been shuffling

that morning, formed a reading lesson in French.

Everybody was the friend of Quarles. He would be groping his way alone

over a path to a class but a brief moment, for a student, playing

ball, nearby would signal to his comrade, who would hold the ball, and

then, throwing down his glove would hurry over, have a cheery word

of greeting, ask Quarles whither he was bound, link arms with the

blind student and guide him into a path where he could find his own

way without need of piloting. In this way, Quarles must have felt the

arm of nearly every upper-classman, for not only were they willing to

straighten out his walks for him, and read to him, but they also took

him with them on excursions, which he shared with excellent comradeship

and proved to be as good a mountain climber as the best.

In this way, too, through walks, at meals, and in classes, I soon had

the students differentiated and had a formidable list of friendships.

It was my custom, throughout the fall months when the highways were

hard and untouched by snow, to ride weekly to and from college on

a bicycle which I had bought for that purpose. On this twenty-mile

excursion, along a winding river and through quiet, little hamlets, I

had certain resting-places where I could breathe and refresh myself

with a sup of water.

Doctor Floyd’s well, conveniently near the highway at the summit of

a steep grade, had also a rustic bench near it, from which a most

gratifying vista could be obtained, which included the view of a

pyramidal mountain cone framed in a circular opening of twinkling

poplar leaves, at whose foot a silvery dash of river curved under high,

bush-lined banks, with now and then a cow or a colt completing the

composition by standing in the river.

The Doctor, himself, whose permission to drink of the water and to

seat myself on the bench for a rest I had taken pains to secure, was

a short, stout, bald-headed man of about sixty, whose clean-shaven

cheeks were always flushed by an excess of blood. He had retired from

active practise and was engaged in the delightful, old age recreation

of seeing how many eggs he could persuade a harem of Plymouth Rocks to

lay through a most careful, scientific mixture of laying foods, use

of germless drinking troughs, and adaptation to an expensive mode of

existence.

One Saturday noon, as I sat on the bench puffing for breath, for the

day was both dusty and hot, the Doctor, with the egg record for the

week in his hands, which he came down to show me, sat down on the bench

and said,

“Well, do those wild students know what they are in college for?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled by his sneer.

“Usually,” he explained, “more’n half of the students in the college

over there don’t know why they’re there!”

“Oh,” I said, “there are a great number of my friends who are not

certain what they are going to do in the world, after graduation, if

that is what you mean, Doctor.”

He rubbed his fat hands in revengeful gratification.

“That’s just it! Just it!” he laughed, cynically. “It’s all a waste

of good money and precious time. There’s no good can come of it.

They don’t take their studies seriously enough. Let me see, how many

subjects does a student have to select from under that new-fangled

election system they have--study made easy, I call it--how many, now?”

“I think there must be in the neighborhood of a hundred different

courses, a majority of which are elective, so far I know.”

“And the young lazybones pick out the easiest courses they can,

independent of the good it’ll do ’em, eh?”

“Perhaps they do,” I replied, antagonized by his critical and

belligerent tone. “But then, I don’t believe that a liberal education:

a college course, has to do merely with giving a student a lot of

technical information!”

The little man fussily remonstrated.

“What? I thought that colleges were in the world to fit men for their

work, and that if they’re to be doctors, why, they’re to be taught

medicine and nothing else!”

“That is the function of professional schools,” I agreed. “Take my

case, for instance. I am a minister. I spent three years in a good

theological seminary. While there I wanted technical information on

my profession. I got it, and assimilated more or less--perhaps less.

But when I came to college I did not come to add to my technical

theological knowledge; not at all!”

“What did you come for, then,” he asked, with another sneer, “to get

the degree, I suppose, like a lot of others?”

“I don’t think you give me credit for being a man of ordinary

intelligence,” I replied, hotly, angered by his insinuation.

“Then what under heaven did you come to college for, if not to increase

your theological information and whatever ability you might have as a

preacher.”

“I came to college,” I replied, “to get the other man’s point of

view. I reasoned with myself that a purely technical education tends

to narrow a man unless supplemented by an education which might be

entitled, ‘The Other Man’s Point of View.’”

“That’s a thrust at me,” replied the Doctor, “as if to say that I,

because I took my medicine with old Dr. Desbrow, and never went to one

of your colleges, was narrow. The idea!”

“I was not alluding to you, sir,” I responded. “I was merely making a

generalization which seems provable. For instance, I have a friend who

is an expert surgeon. He has been trained in some of the best clinics

and has diplomas from the most reputable medical colleges. He has

learned his profession well, in all its finer, technical points. But he

never received any liberal education. The result is, that he is narrow

in his tastes, caring for nothing which is not flavored by anaesthetics

or redolent of carbolic acid. As there are among his friends those

whose stomachs turn at the mention of an operation or at the whisper

of anaesthetics, he has no way of interesting them on subjects in

which they are interested. He imagines that because all the world is

not poking steel points in ulcers and cancers, it had better be left

alone. The result is, that when you mention the surgeon’s name to the

townsfolk, you will hear words like these: ‘A fine surgeon, but as

cranky and bitter as a hobby-rider.’ No one can get along with him. He

loses business by it. He knows nothing but his profession!”

“Well,” demanded the doctor, “that’s a job big enough for any man with

brains, isn’t it?”

“True,” I responded, “but the truly _educated_ surgeon has not only to

know his tools, his diagnoses, his operating methods, but along with

that knowledge, his final success demands that he be liberally trained

in human nature, that he have at least a faint idea of the subjects in

which other people are interested. A liberal education, added to his

professional education gives him that.”

“I’d like to know how?” demanded the Doctor.

“Well, take my case again, for instance. I am going to take a lot of

studies which are not technically pertinent to sermons or doctrines:

study of Dutch paintings, Italian, Chemistry, Anatomy of the Brain and

Sense Organs, and others which I can’t mention at this time, because

I have not decided just what they will be. Here is what I mean. After

an introductory study of Italian, I shall learn just how the Italians

think. It is good to know that, surely? Then after a brief course in

chemistry, though I shall not care enough about it when I am through

with the experiments, to carry off a test tube, tie it with baby ribbon

and keep it for a souvenir, as some students do, I shall ever after

realize that while I am swearing by theology, others, about me, have

reason for being engrossed in chemical formulas and tests. Each study

that I shall take, and each classroom that I shall visit, will form

opportunities for me to get at the points of view which determine why

Tom differs from Joe and why Joe differs from me. If the college can

do that, Doctor, and not add a single jot to my theological knowledge,

I shall feel more than repaid for the time I spend in it and the money

I pay to it. So that is why I don’t think it either wasted time or an

entirely hopeless situation, Doctor, if a large number of students in

the college do not know why they are there. One thing is certain, they

are getting trained in the other man’s point of view!”

The Doctor, evidently not at all in agreement with my explanation,

after he had pooh-poohed to himself for a minute, thought to change the

subject and for that purpose he said to me,

“I rather pity you, young man. I always did pity ministers. They don’t

seem to do anything substantial; that’s why I don’t go near a church.

It’s all up-in-the-air preaching, and darned little doing. Now, keeping

pullets or mixing a sick draught--why, they are something worth while,

now--but preaching and preachers--um!”

“The other man’s point of view, Doctor,” I laughed, as I mounted my

wheel and started off.

A week later, the Doctor came out of the house, when I stopped at the

well, and as he drew near he shouted,

“I drove over to the college, last Wednesday. What a lazy set of

loafers you’ve got over there, to be sure. I was there in the afternoon

and saw them reading papers, strolling around the campus and playing

all sorts of games. I don’t think they’ll amount to much in the world

if they go on at that rate. They seem so aimless! I heard one fellow,

with turned up trousers and purple socks that would have given light

at night, say to another student, something about throwing books and

professors to the dogs--or some such stuff!”

“Yes,” I admitted, “I hear that every day. I know a good many students

who care little about classes and text books.”

The doctor, evidently gratified with that admission grunted,

“Then what’s the good of the college--to them. Why doesn’t it send them

into the world to be useful?”

“That’s what a good many people say, about us students,” I replied.

“But books and professors and courses of study are only a part of what

a student gets in our college, sir. It’s a very peculiar situation.

I’m older than most of the students, and have had the advantage of a

professional training, and so can look on the college through somewhat

serious eyes. You would be astounded, for instance, at the tremendous

education that the men receive from purely student affairs.”

“Going into the country, when the football team’s won over Princeton,

for instance,” sniffed the Doctor, “and tearing down farm fences! Oh,

yes, a wonderful education in student affairs? Like one of your boys

that came into this village, and in broad daylight went up to the

grocery store, there, on the main street, and deliberately took down

and carried off a four-foot, patent-medicine thermometer, the folks

all the while thinking him to be an agent fellow, come to mend it,

or change it. Oh, yes, a wonderful education those fellows get among

themselves!”

After the old man had frightened one of his pullets back into the rear

of the house, I replied,

“No, I didn’t refer to isolated acts of mischief, Doctor, but to the

student enterprises that create ability. Our college is nothing more

than wheels within wheels. There are professors and classroom studies

for the big, outside wheels, and for the inner wheels, whirling all the

time, are the college newspaper, the college magazine, the athletic

business, the writing and staging of plays, the dramatic clubs, the

musical clubs, the social service enterprises, the political clubs

and the religious work. Why, Doctor, those students conduct all

those things practically without help from outsiders. You would be

astounded at the amount of executive and administrative ability they

demand. The students who run the monthly magazine, for instance, must

be good editors, fair writers, and managers of astuteness, for it has

to pay for itself, at least, and must express literary power. It is

the same with the newspaper. That is a business in itself, yet, it is

managed, financed and edited entirely by students, many of whom find it

difficult to get interested in the routine of the college curriculum.

When you multiply these business and serious activities, you find the

students actually doing profitable and character-forming tasks outside

of the classrooms which few critics of the college take the trouble

to notice. Why, it was only a week ago, that a student came into my

room and had a talk with me about a new college enterprise that seemed

formidable. He was a student who did not care five toothpicks for his

studies. He was in difficulties with his physics course, at the time,

having failed in it twice, and seeming to be letting his third and

last chance for his degree slip past without giving it a thought. The

people on the campus, and the professors in the classrooms appraised

this fellow as a ‘loafer’ and an ‘idler.’ Yet, that morning he came to

me and said that he proposed to start a comic monthly, at ten cents a

copy, himself to be editor-in-chief, and the jokes, poems, pictures,

designs, the securing of advertisement and subscribers, to be under his

general charge and apportioned to willing students. He went off for

two days, at his own expense, secured over a hundred dollars’ worth

of advertising, and only last week had newsboys selling on the campus

a first-class, neatly printed, well-filled, artistically illustrated

comic monthly, which, by this time has its regular staff of student

artists, poets, joke writers, business managers, and board of editors;

it’s a paper which promises to be one of the features of student life.

No, Doctor,” I concluded as I felt of my tires, preparatory to taking

up my journey towards home, “students may seem shiftless, indifferent,

and unenthusiastic on the campus, but when you get behind the laziest

of them you are liable to find that they are giving themselves to

some sort of character-making work,--contrary to the posters which

lead outsiders to think that college life consists of a place where

the student sits in the sun on a fence, smoking a pipe with a leashed

bull-pup at his feet!”

“Say,” called the Doctor, as I fitted the toe clips to my shoes, “my

pullets did a hundred and sixty this week. Laying,--eh?”

_Chapter XXXV. Hot-Popovers and a Cold Watch in the Station. The

Sleigh-load of Talent_

When the winter storms piled the river highway with snowdrifts, I

had to put aside my bicycle and use the railway trains. This made it

necessary for me to leave my home on the Sunday midnight train that I

might be ready for my classes at college, on Monday morning. In that

northern part of New England what storms could grip the land and put

a stop to train traffic and cartage! One of my parishioners showed

me, for my comfort possibly, an actual photograph of a drift of snow

so high that a liberal load of hay on a wagon stood on a level with

it, when a gap was dug through. I had packed fir boughs around the

parsonage cellar wall, and that was soon covered with the drifts;

even the window sills were reached by the snow at last. As for the

crumpled hills surrounding the village, their lonely, hurricane-swept

crests,--with the stick-like birches bending away from the north like

timid creatures afraid to stand up, day by day, against those icy

assaults,--presented a wild, dismal picture of winter’s fury.

My custom was, during those months, to arrive home on the Saturday

afternoon train and immediately set to work splitting the maple blocks

of wood into convenient fire-wood and stacking a week’s supply in the

kitchen wood-box, while my wife held a meeting with the children of the

parish in the parlor. Then on Sunday, I would preach two sermons. I had

to wear my overshoes in the evening on account of the chill in which

the vestry was always wrapped. After this service, my wife would have

the supper table spread with preserved pears, hot pop-overs and cocoa.

We would linger over this meal, the last I should have at home for a

week, and keeping a sharp eye on the clock. At the first announcement

of ten o’clock, the lantern would be lighted and the words of farewell

be given at the door. Then out into the dark misery of the night,

with my lantern flickering my shadow over the houses, and my wife’s

lonesome sigh echoing in my heart, I would creep through the storms

of swirling snow, which wet my hot cheeks, pass over the quiet bridge

to the opposite side of the river and climb up a steep road until the

silent, isolated station was reached. Across the river I could see the

dark outlines of the village, and in the midst of it, a golden point

of light: the light of my home. The train was due at half-past ten,

but it was never on time and so I had long waits. The station-master

left the station dark on Sunday evenings. He gave me a key with which I

unlocked the door and was able to keep warm while waiting. After having

lighted the swinging lamp, I would produce a book and let the slow

minutes pass until the late train screamed around the corner, as if

angry with itself for its slow progress between stations. On the first

sound of the whistle, it would be a wild scramble to quench the light,

lock the door, and rush out to the train before it pulled out from the

station.

An hour later the train would draw into the terminus and leave me

stranded, four miles away from my dormitory. Then I had to cross over

to the hotel, engage one of the rooms and try to sleep till half-past

five the next morning; if sleep were possible with such a screaming

of freight-train whistles, and such a bumping of shifting engines as

prevailed through the small hours of the night.

At eight o’clock the following morning, eyelids leaden with loss of

sleep and my body weakened through lack of rest, and an inadequate

breakfast, I would commence the first of my three Monday morning

classes, and not be free from the intellectual discipline again until

nearly noon, after which I would spend the afternoon in sleep or

recreation.

One day the director of social service, a department of the religious

work done by students, came to me and said,

“Priddy, we’ve got all sorts of concert talent about here. Would your

church care if we should give them an evening’s entertainment?”

“They can’t afford to do much in that line,” I replied.

“But all we shall expect will be our expenses and a good, hot supper.

We can hire a big sleigh and make up quite a party to go over the

hills.”

“What have you got--for talent?” I asked.

He thought a minute, and then said,

“Why, we’ve got banjo players to spare, club jugglers, a

sleight-of-hand performer, four or five male quartettes, a stringed

orchestra, two readers, and a ventriloquist. Of course, the night we

could give to you would find some of these students unable to go, but

tell me what sort of an entertainment you would like and I’ll see what

we can do for you. We want to make the evenings brighter in some of

these isolated, north country villages. It’s a little bit of social

service that brings its own reward, for the boys like to get out and

have a good country supper!”

He was able, finally, to make up a program which included a reader,

a young professor who would swing flaming clubs, a sleight-of-hand

performer and a male quartette.

On the afternoon appointed, these artists, wrapped up in thick clothes,

appeared in front of a dormitory and were packed into a huge barge on

runners until, including some invited professors and their wives, we

numbered twenty or more.

The four horses, with streamers of brass bells hanging in front of them

jingled over the packed snow roads of the village and finally brought

us into the less used hill roads, which, in places rambled over the

hills until the climb seemed interminable. The snow began to fall and

we plunged down the steep declivities, half blinded by it, but opposing

the storm with jokes, songs and banter.

On a shelf of road, which had been cut from a steep hillside, and which

the winds, unhindered by protecting wall or trees, had stripped of snow

and left glare ice for the sleigh to cross, our runners skidded to

such an angle that we were threatened with an overturn that would have

hurled us down the steep bank, had not some of the students leaped to

the ground, and by sheer strength, aided by the careful control of the

driver, kept the sleigh to the road until we were in safety.

Then as the twilight set in, and there were no sign-posts to guide

us, we stopped at the first house and asked how far we were from the

village. An old woman, dressed in a greasy print wrapper, and drawing

gulps of smoke from a briar pipe, said she guessed we were “nigh four

miles this side of it.” We drove through the storm for a quarter of an

hour more, and then, thinking that we should be coming in sight of the

village, we stopped a man who was going to his barn with milking cans

and repeated our request as to how far we were from the village, and,

as if he had been in league with the old woman with the pipe, a mile

back he said,

“’Bout four mile, I’d say!”

Hopefully, then, we rumbled and scraped down a hill for another half

hour, and then, meeting another sleigh, coming in our direction, our

driver hailed the man at the reins, who was muffled to his ears in a

swathing of crazy-quilt, and shouted,

“How far are we from the village?”

And much to our dismay, a rumbling answer came from the folds of the

crazy-quilt, which we had to interpret as,

“Jes’ four mile!”

Ten minutes, later, however, we had the joy of arriving hungry, cold,

but not without spirit, at the church door, where, under kerosene

lamps, and on white paper table-cloths, was spread a meal of hot

biscuits, hot yellow-eyed beans, hot pea beans, potato salad, hot

kidney beans, dill pickles, pickled beets, four sorts of frosted cake,

luscious lemon pies and coffee.

After the supper, the students went into my church and found a hundred

of the villagers gathered, in spite of the storm. The quartette sang

entrancingly their college jingles. The young professor swung his

flaming clubs, until, when he was in the midst of some complicated

spirals his alcohol-soaked rags burnt out, unexpectedly, and he had

to apologize since he could not go on with his novel act because

his “spirits had given out.” The reader gave, with great effect, a

memorable quarrel between man and wife, and sparkling anecdotes which

would have taken the dullness off a yokel’s heart. Then the star of the

concert, the sleight-of-hand performer began his skilful mysteries.

He made a pencil cling to the palm of his hand, brought flags and

flowers from an empty hat, multiplied a billiard ball into six, wafted

a half dollar into thin air, and, finally, produced a pack of cards, at

the sight of which, I thought my deacons would institute proceedings

of worldliness against me for allowing it, but which, when made to

do the weirdest acts, finally reconciled even the most austere of

them; so much so that one grim Puritan even came forward and held the

pack--after much persuasion--while the man of mystery seemed to change

them without the holder’s knowledge.

At the close of the entertainment, the college delegation, after going,

every one, to the church women and declaring that they had never

eaten a better supper than had been provided, got into the sleigh, the

driver cracked his long whip with a deft explosion for the ears of the

on-looking villagers, and with a hearty yell, they started on their

way down the river road through the storm, and I stood with my wife at

our door until their songs died away among the midnight shadows of the

hills and storm.

_Chapter XXXVI. A Chapter of Sentiment and Literary Atmosphere,

Including the Account of Sanderson, the Procrastinator. How Two Prize

Checks Were Spent. A Parish of Talent_

When came the announcement of Spring, at college, after the lawns and

the paths had dried, and when the evenings were filled with the throaty

gurglings of hopping robins. A sign in front of the Commons announced,

“Class Sing Tonight 7:30.” This is a “Sing;”

At seven o’clock the students gather by classes at four different parts

of the campus: the seniors to sit on their double fence, the juniors to

sit on the steps of the recitation hall, the sophomores to occupy the

commodious steps of the Assembly Hall, and the freshmen to stand near

the library.

Silence!

Suddenly the low, vibrating voices of the seniors fill the air with,

“Harvest Moon.” On its completion, the three lower classes send

snapping hand claps over to the fence.

Silence!

The juniors send across to the seniors the melodious, sentimental song,

“Summer Days and Love, Love, Love!” over the triple trills of which

the high-pitched tenors linger as if they would stop there and sound

those musical half tones until out of breath. Led by the seniors, the

underclassmen repeat the hand-clapping.

Silence!

With a sudden, flank attack, the sophomores, directed by a

shirt-sleeved and very fat student fly into the midst of “Dolly Grey,”

a stirring war ballad, and from the pathos which wells out of the

sentimental passages, one can easily imagine those wild, irresponsible

sophomores crying in harmony with it. Once more the three classes snap

their applause.

Silence!

A longer silence this time, for the freshmen, making their first

appearance in the rôle of class singers--a thick mass of them--cannot

agree with their director as to what the premiere shall be. Soon the

matter is settled. An arm is raised and then--a low rumble that dies

down, followed by three giant laughs from three different points of the

campus. The freshman leader has pitched the tune too low.

“Out with it, Freshies!” comes a mocking, cutting call across from the

sophomores--traditional enemies of the freshmen.

One more try, and with the effect of an aeroplane getting its flight

slowly, hesitatingly, the freshman song at last rises to a mighty,

boyish, exultant rendering of “Old Black Joe!” for they dare not trust

themselves with a recent melody.

After the songs, the cheers! the class cheers!

The seniors give one for the juniors, and the juniors applaud it.

The seniors give one for the sophomores, and the sophomores applaud it.

Then the seniors give a heartier one for the freshmen, and those boys

almost split the heavens with their yellings.

Next the juniors make the rounds of the classes, with the same response

of applause, save that their cheer for the seniors gets but scant and

dignified applause, for the seniors must not be too boyish!

Then the sophomores and the freshmen have their turn and the cheering

is over.

Silence. The night is deepening, and one hardly stirs. Four huge masses

of shadow move in the direction of the campus centre. Then one hears a

martial, drill-sergeant’s “Left, left, left!” as the classes catch the

step. It is so arranged that, without a halt, the four classes merge

into one mass in the middle of the green.

Silence again. Not a sound is heard, until the college song-leader

hums a pitch. Then the Alma Mater hymn goes up with all the thrilling

reverence in it of a song of love sung to the college mother. If one

were near the singers, it would be possible to see, how, when the song

deepens in theme, the sophomore unconsciously throws his arm over the

shoulder of the freshman, and the senior throws his over the shoulder

of the junior: all brothers as the melody unfolds itself.

The hymn ended, the cheer-leader moves to the side of the song-leader,

says a few words, and then, as he takes the position of a

prize-fighter, on guard, with his fist extended, he pulls out from the

disciplined throats, a snappy, thundering crash of a college cheer. It

is over. The crowd thins out over the star-lighted campus. Spring has

come!

I was amazed, that year, at the amount of personal supervision the

professors gave to the students, out of hours, amidst such large

classes as they were called upon to instruct. It had been drilled into

my mind at Evangelical University that only in the small college is it

possible for the professors to “get next” to the student in a wise,

helpful manner. So that when I came into the centre of the college

life, in all its complexity, diversity and confusion, I actually

expected to see the professors deliver their lectures, and then coldly

leave us to ourselves, withdrawing themselves from the student life

with academic aloofness.

But on Tuesday evenings the faculty were “at home” and welcomed such

student visitors as cared to accept the courteous hospitality of

their cheerful homes. After classes, and in their offices at certain

hours, we could go to our teachers and be sure of receiving their most

thorough attention on the matter in mind. Then, too, the professors

were always eagerly seeking to align themselves to our life: to enter

with us into the profitable ventures of a social, inspiring nature.

Thus it came about that they served on athletic committees, religious

boards, literary and social programs. It was because they possessed

this spirit of fellowship with their students, that I was enabled to

venture into a new world of opportunity. It was in this wise.

I had been spending the largest proportion of my time in literary

composition, for my wife, my sermon critic, had found that in my pulpit

address I needed rhetorical clearness, so I determined to discipline

myself to that end. When the English professor gave out exercises, like

editorials, descriptions, book reviews, or short stories, I resolved

to put the burden of my time in such writings with no other thought

than to remedy my pulpit faults. When some of these exercises were

returned, after examination by the professor, I found red pencil notes,

suggesting that this or that be submitted for publication in the

college periodicals. These red pencil suggestions were common in the

class, and gave great inspiration to the other students, as they gave

inspiration to me. One day, when I arrived late at class, I found the

professor reading aloud a description I had written. This was followed

by a request for a conference in the teacher’s office.