Some sixty-five years later, one hot day of midsummer in 1865--one
Saturday afternoon--a lad was cutting weeds in a woodland pasture; a
big, raw-boned, demure boy of near eighteen.
He had on heavy shoes, the toes green with grass stain; the leather so
seasoned by morning dews as to be like wood for hardness. These were to
keep his feet protected from briers or from the bees scattered upon the
wild white clover or from the terrible hidden thorns of the
honey-locust. No socks. A pair of scant homespun trousers, long
outgrown. A coarse clean shirt. His big shock-head thatched with yellow
straw, a dilapidated sun-and-rain shed.
The lanky young giant cut and cut and cut: great purple-bodied poke,
strung with crimson-juiced seed; great burdock, its green burrs a
plague; great milkweed, its creamy sap gushing at every gash; great
thistles, thousand-nettled; great ironweed, plumed with royal purple;
now and then a straggling bramble prone with velvety berries--the
outpost of a patch behind him; now and then--more carefully, lest he
notch his blade--low sprouts of wild cane, survivals of the
impenetrable brakes of pioneer days. All these and more, the rank,
mighty measure of the soil's fertility--low down.
Measure of its fertility aloft, the tops of the trees, from which the
call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the memory of a
sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A hot crowded land,
crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and
around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues
of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to
be dragged hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like a
moss on a sluggish pond. A deep robust land; and among its growths
he--this lad, in his way a self-unconscious human weed, the seed of his
kind borne in from far some generations back, but springing out of the
soil naturally now, sap of its sap, strength of its strength.
He paused by and by and passed his forefinger across his forehead,
brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tip
of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook--he was using
that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the
brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his
tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with
poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then
he drew a whetstone from his pocket, spat on it, and fell to sharpening
his blade.
The heat of his work, the stifling air, the many-toned woods, the sense
of the vast summering land--these things were not in his thoughts. Some
days before, despatched from homestead to homestead, rumors had reached
him away off here at work on his father's farm, of a great university
to be opened the following autumn at Lexington. The like of it with its
many colleges Kentucky, the South, the Mississippi valley had never
seen. It had been the talk among the farming people in their harvest
fields, at the cross-roads, on their porches--the one deep sensation
among them since the war.
For solemn, heart-stirring as such tidings would have been at any other
time, more so at this. Here, on the tableland of this unique border
state, Kentucky--between the halves of the nation lately at
strife--scene of their advancing and retreating armies--pit of a
frenzied commonwealth--here was to arise this calm university, pledge
of the new times, plea for the peace and amity of learning, fresh
chance for study of the revelation of the Lord of Hosts and God of
battles. The animosities were over, the humanities re-begun.
Can you remember your youth well enough to be able to recall the time
when the great things happened for which you seemed to be waiting? The
boy who is to be a soldier--one day he hears a distant bugle: at once
HE knows. A second glimpses a bellying sail: straightway the ocean path
beckons to him. A third discovers a college, and toward its kindly
lamps of learning turns young eyes that have been kindled and will stay
kindled to the end.
For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's plan
which always passes understanding, had been growing more unhappy in his
place in creation. By temperament he was of a type the most joyous and
self-reliant--those sure signs of health; and discontent now was due to
the fact that he had outgrown his place. Parentage--a farm and its
tasks--a country neighborhood and its narrowness--what more are these
sometimes than a starting-point for a young life; as a flowerpot might
serve to sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hour
when it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the whole
heavens and the earth; as the shell and yolk of an egg are the
starting-point for the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing only he had
not outgrown, in one thing only he was not unhappy: his religious
nature. This had always been in him as breath was in him, as blood was
in him: it was his life. Dissatisfied now with his position in the
world, it was this alone that kept him contented in himself. Often the
religious are the weary; and perhaps nowhere else does a perpetual
vision of Heaven so disclose itself to the weary as above lonely
toiling fields. The lad had long been lifting his inner eye to this
vision.
When, therefore, the tidings of the university with its Bible College
reached him, whose outward mould was hardship, whose inner bliss was
piety, at once they fitted his ear as the right sound, as the gladness
of long awaited intelligence. It was bugle to the soldier, sail to the
sailor, lamp of learning to the innate student At once he knew that he
was going to the university--sometime, somehow--and from that moment
felt no more discontent, void, restlessness, nor longing.
It was of this university, then, that he was happily day-dreaming as he
whetted his hemp hook in the depths of the woods that Saturday
afternoon. Sitting low amid heat and weeds and thorns, he was already
as one who had climbed above the earth's eternal snow-line and sees
only white peaks and pinnacles--the last sublimities.
He felt impatient for to-morrow. One of the professors of the
university, of the faculty of the Bible College, had been travelling
over the state during the summer, pleading its cause before the people.
He had come into that neighborhood to preach and to plead. The lad
would be there to hear.
The church in which the professor was to plead for learning and
religion was the one first set up in the Kentucky wilderness as a house
of religious liberty; and the lad was a great-grandchild of the founder
of that church, here emerging mysteriously from the deeps of life four
generations down the line.