## The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through the school: The experiences of a mill boy in securing an education

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Title: Through the school: The experiences of a mill boy in securing an education

Author: Frederic Kenyon Brown

Illustrator: Wladyslaw T. Benda

Frank T. Merrill

Release date: August 15, 2022 [eBook #68750]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Pilgrim Press, 1912

Credits: David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE SCHOOL: THE EXPERIENCES OF A MILL BOY IN SECURING AN EDUCATION ***

# THROUGH THE SCHOOL

I Appeared before the President Considerably Unnerved

THROUGH THE
SCHOOL

THE EXPERIENCES OF A MILL BOY
IN SECURING AN EDUCATION

BY
AL PRIDDY
Author of: Through the Mill: The Life of a Mill Boy

THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTONNEW YORK CHICAGO

COPYRIGHT, 1912
BY LUTHER H. CARY
Published, September, 1912
THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS
[W · D · O]
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A

TO
W. H. S.
In the same terms and pictures I would employ were
I in the cheer of his parson’s study giving
my experiences by word of mouth.

## Preface

THESE forty chapters of absolutely real autobiography are intended to give the reader faith in American education and to reconstruct the human struggles and tests of character which attend the progress of the poor but ambitious lads through a formal education for life.

[ix]

## Contents

Chapter I | Page
Fifteen Dollars and Sixty-five Cents Worth of International Travel. An Inspiring Reception in Front of Chief Pungo Memorial Hall | 3
Chapter II
I Help a Real Poet to Sing his Hymn. My First Chance and How I Succeeded with it | 24
Chapter III
Thropper’s Puff Tie. Sounds That Passed in the Night. The Possible Advantages of Speaking Tubes. The Scroll of Divine History. The Meditations of a Saint. How Thropper Lost his Pious Reputation | 36
Chapter IV
Thundering Gymnastics. How to Keep on the Good Side of the Young Women with Scriptural Quotations. The Establishment of Friendship. Carrying Water for Beauty. How Music may be Something More than Music. The Wonderful, Austere M an that Thropper led me to | 44
Chapter V
Pungo Hall’s Occupants: Estes Who Planned to Take a Tent and Plant it in the Midst of The World’s Sin; of The Little Man Who Fled from the Chidings of a ‘D.D.’: of Calloused Hands and Showing How “Pa” Borden was Beaten by the Grass Widower with The Long Hair | 58
Chapter VI
A Financial Pessimism Taken in Hand by Thropper and Shown in its Real Light. A Turkish Rug that Smoked. A Poet in Search of Kerosene. The Wonderful Antics of an Ironing-Board. Economy at a Tub and Three Waiting for it After Brock’s Bath. The Chemical Reduction of a Cauldron of Tomatoes into Something Sweet | 67
Chapter VII
An Academic Ride in Five Carriages at Once. A Business Appeal Mixed in with the Order of Creation. How We Got Lost in a Discussion. Whether it is Best for a Man to Marry his First Love. A Sleuth-Dean. A Queen’s Birthday Supper with an[x] Athletic Conclusion. Jerry Birch Stands up for Albion. How we Tamed him | 80
Chapter VIII
The Doctrinal Temper of the University, and Thropper’s Talk about it. Introduces the Select Board of the Pharisees. A Prayer-meeting Monopoly Combated by Independants. Jason on my Track and How it Came out | 89
Chapter IX
My Trip into the Magic World of the Past. How Appreciation is sometimes Worth More than Money. Jason and his Coterie on Scent of Terrible Heresies. How God Takes Care of His Orators. How a Big Soul can go through Annoyances | 102
Chapter X
The Magnitude of a Postage Stamp. Showing how Desperate the Thirst for Money made me. Brock’s Rosy Nose and its Possibilities as a Fireplace. How Brock thought he was Fooling me and the Other Way About. The Barrow that Became our Enemy and how Brock Revenged himself on it | 109
Chapter XI
How I Competed with Patrick Henry and was made Aware of a Waste of the Eighth Letter of the Alphabet. How I Condensed all my Studies into an Oration. How the Populace Greeted my Rehearsal. Striking the Top Pitch | 119
Chapter XII
The Personnel of “The Clamorous Eight” and other Social Matters. The “Blepoes” and The “Boulomaies” Invite me into Fellowship with a Protest from Jason. Epics and Lyrics of Love. “Pa” Borden Speaks for the Benedicts on a Momentous Matter. How the Magic Tree Lured Some Unfaithful Ones from their Sworn Duty | 126
Chapter XIII
How One Dollar and a Half Secured “The Devil in Society.” The Medicine Chest which Became a Tract Depository under the Teachings of a New Creed. How I Stuck to Orthodoxy | 135
Chapter XIV
A Chapter Depicting how Strife Existed Between the Pro-Gymnasiums and the Anti-Gymnasiums and Showing how baseball, Debates and an Epidemic Determined Matters This Way and That | 140
Chapter XV[xi]
A Ph.D. in a Clay Ditch and the Futility of it. A Can of Beans at the Conclusion of a Morbid Meditation. How Thropper and I Played David and Jonathan | 145
Chapter XVI
Visions, Hysteria, Dogma, and Poor Lessons to the Front when the Revivalists Arrived. How Natural it Sounded when “Bird” Thurlow Asked a Flippant Question | 151
Chapter XVII
My Presidential Pose and its Central Place in “The Record.” A Wistful Glance and Some Practical Plans towards Eastern Education. How the Little Sparrow Brought my Class Colors as I Gave the Class “Oration.” Ends in a Fight | 157
Chapter XVIII
Thropper Unfolds Something Better than Canned Foods. A Lesson with the Flat Iron. Thropper Proposes that I Chaperone Horses | 162
Chapter XIX
A Chapter Which Has to do with a Series of Exciting Affairs that Occurred between the West and the East, and Which are Better to Read about than to Endure | 171
Chapter XX
My Aunt Millie’s Interpretation of Education. The Right Sort of an Adviser Gets Hold of me | 188
Chapter XXI
Over the Sea to a New Educational Chance. How I Revenged Myself on the Hungry Days. The Cloistered Serenity of the New Place | 197
Chapter XXII
Stoves with Traditions, Domestic Habits, and Greek, “Boys Will be Boys” | 204
Chapter XXIII
A Plot Which had for its End the Raising up of a Discouraged, Young Preacher | 208
Chapter XXIV
Burner, a Searcher After Truth. How a May-Pole Subdued a Tribe of Little Savages | 219
Chapter XXV[xii]
At the Heart of Human Nature. A Confidential Walk with a Dollar Bill at the End of it. A Philosophical Observation from the Stage-Driver | 226
Chapter XXVI
The Strange Adventure of Burner into Nothing, and How my Own Mind Got into Trouble, and How my Faith was Strengthened under the Chapel Window | 235
Chapter XXVII
The Wonderful Summer on the Pleasure Island | 243
Chapter XXVIII
How a Parsonage Suggests a Wife. The Convincing Revelations of a Phrenologist Who Examined The Students’ Bumps | 248
Chapter XXIX
It Devolves upon me to Entertain a Guest. The Sentimental Consequences Which Ensued | 256
Chapter XXX
A Heretic Hunter. The Orthodoxy of the Seminary Admirably Defended. I Contract a Fashionable Disease, and also Receive a Very Unsettling Letter | 263
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 | 269
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 | 276
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 | 282
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[xiii] Medical Man who was Specializing in Hens | 292
Chapter XXXV
Hot-Popovers and a Cold Watch in the Station. The Sleigh-load of Talent | 315
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 | 323
Chapter XXXVII
Tieresias, the Blind Prophet, and Squeem, the Student in the Back-waters of College Life. A Night of Grim Fate | 348
Chapter XXXVIII
A Chapter in which a Hero Does a Thing to his Credit | 359
Chapter XXXIX
The Lost Parrot. Academic Burlesque. The Nervousness of the Final Minute. A Religious Outcropping in a Non-Pious Heart | 379
Chapter XL
In Which the Account Comes to a Conclusion in the Life of a Relative. Martin Quotes Spanish, and has the Last Word | 387

[xiv]

[xv]

## Illustrations

I Appeared before the President Considerably Unnerved | Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
Jason, the Poet, Looked in | 76
Evangelical University was Treated to its First Match Game | 142
Say, How Much Yo’ Want fo’ dat Watch? | 184
So Arm in Arm the Blind Student and I Walked | 350

[1]

THROUGH THE SCHOOL

[2]

[3]

THROUGH THE
SCHOOL

## Chapter I. Fifteen Dollars and
Sixty-five Cents Worth of International
Travel. An Inspiring
Reception in Front of Chief Pungo
Memorial Hall

IT was like taking off an old, worn, unadorning suit of clothes as the Boston Express whirled me away from the City of Mills. It hummed with me over the streets on which I had walked to and from work as a mill boy. It darted me past the rows of tenements where sordid and sinful memories lingered. “Thank God! Thank God!” Out and away from it all. Away from the hum, the bee-like, monotonous hum of the mill machines that overpower the nerves and dull the spirit of the[4] workers! Away from the bells and blaring fog whistles that disturb the sleep of tired, weary, discouraged toilers; the bells and whistles that sometimes mean the jubilant clamor of the mills over their moaning, rebellious workers. Past the pale faces that waited at the crossings for the train to pass; faces whose eyes gleamed with an instant’s wish that the train had them in it, too! Yes, I was the chosen from among over twenty thousand workers that day. I was actually on my way to seek an education! There, for proof that it was no dream, was my long green ticket with its dozen coupons in my hands! There was my brand new suit-case! How lucky I was! Think of the fellows who had better mental furnishing than I, who had even money in the bank, parents who were urging them to strive for an education, friends who would loan them money, and yet, they were going to the mill at that very moment, and would go tomorrow, and the day after, because they were afraid to make the break! Then I thought: “Well, they would have made the break long ago if they had lived with an aunt and uncle who wasted their money on drink. That would frighten them into it. There’s some good in evil after all. I shouldn’t be on this train today if my foster parents had been kinder, more considerate! I guess it’d be a good thing if a few of the other mill fellows, who are ambitious, had something like it to frighten them[5] off. It’s probably the only way they’ll go out and make their chance!”

Then the vision of the country-side, painted in the glories of Autumn, the flashing views of cranberry bogs, crowded with sun-bonneted pickers, called my mind to the new joys of existence. Here I was, out in the world at last! Not the romp of a holiday, with the mill room for next morning, not a vacation of two days with a return at the end of it; but the beginning of an education, a start towards a profession, a great big chance at last to “make something of myself!”

“Here,” I said to the train boy, as he was about to pass me, “give me a packet of that there gum—the peppermint sort.” That train boy didn’t know, as I paid him the five cents by giving him a dollar bill to change, that the purchase was the greatest luxury I should have on that trip of fifteen hundred miles.

While working in the mill, I had never been able to afford a trip to Boston, so when I arrived in the station, and realized that I was even going beyond it, on my first excursion, I said to myself, “Boston is only the first, small step in your travel!” The next coupon on my long ticket paid my fare from the South Station to the North—in a Cab with a Uniformed Driver!! It was the first time I had been in a cab, except at a funeral. I was pleased when the driver took me through the main streets;[6] glad when he had to move cautiously through congested traffic, because people could see me, as I sat nonchalantly in the cab. I took care to see that the blinds were up as far as possible.

In the North Station, when the cab driver had taken me to the train, the car that I was to travel on, to Montreal, was marked off from its fellows by its salmon color. Awed, impressed, I went groping through the dim car until I found a vacant seat into which I comfortably arranged myself. But as the train pulled out, I studied my railroad map, and, on discovering that the Green Mountains would be on the opposite side of the railroad, I made haste to change my seat, so that I might insure myself a view of them; for I had never seen a mountain in my life.

That ride of twelve hours, on an express, did not tire me one bit. I was before the world with a starved, hungry mind and starved, hungry eyes. I kept my eyes glued on the out-of-doors. Yes, I watched both sides of the car at once. I listened for the comments around me and if anything of interest was mentioned I bobbed up my head to look. I watched the time-table for the stations so that I might know when the train passed from one state to another I was actually passing through whole states—five of them in all! Five states of the United States of America! There were few details that I did not observe. I watched the[7] farms, the villages, the back yards of cities; watched the flying trees, the colors of soil, the crops that were being reaped, the winding roads, and the vehicles that waited for us at the country crossings.

At noon we were lumbering through the streets of Manchester, N.H., past the long canal which flows like a sluggish moat along the dismal wall of the mill. Crowds of workers were waiting for us at the crossings; watching us with looks of envy, I thought. I threw up my window, leaned back in my seat, and ostentatiously chewed gum with a smug, proud look, with which I hoped to show the mill boys how unconcerned I was about being a passenger on a Montreal Express!

It was not until we had cleared the big cotton factory towns and cities of New England that I felt entirely like an adventurer, however. Only by the time the cities had been left, the big cities, and the small towns were succeeded by country villages, and the country villages by vast wildernesses of woods and uncultivated fields, did I feel satisfied. Then I knew that if a train wreck should end my journeying, I could settle down on some farm. I should not have to go back into the mill.

By watching my time-table carefully, I knew when to look for the mountains; but long before we reached the place appointed for the vision, my heart was leaping with expectation. We[8] had reached the hilly country, and every high knoll served me for a mountain. But on and on and on, past soaring foothills, went the train until what seemed a slate-colored storm-cloud, a thin veil of atmosphere, caught my attention. Then, as the train turned a bend, the foothills dropped away, and there, like a majestic dream, higher than anything on earth before imagined, were the mountains!

Following the delight of the mountains, I had to think of our approach into another country. We were actually going to leave the United States and enter Canada! Immediately the English blood stirred within me. I was actually entering the domains of the Queen. Just over the border, the train stopped at a little village for water. I spoke to the brakeman “Please, mister,” I said, “how long will we stop?” “Eight minutes altogether,” he replied; “eight sure.” “Are we really in Canada now?” I ventured. “Yep,” he said with decision, “this is Canada, sure enough.” “Then I’m going to get off, for a couple of minutes,” I said. I didn’t explain to him the motive I had in getting off. It was to put the soles of my shoes on FOREIGN SOIL! Unfortunately there had been a generous rain that had mixed with the dirt of the village road, so that when I sought to step on Canadian earth I was called upon to wallow in Canadian mud, and that I would not do. “Never[9] mind,” I consoled myself with. “This board walk is a Canadian board walk and will do.” So I ran a hundred yards into the village along the board walk and came back to the train satisfied. I had stepped on Queen Victoria’s territory, come what might.

When the darkness shut out the view, even then I did not keep my eyes from the windows. I did not know what sights I should get a view of even in the darkness. But all I saw of towns were lights, like stars, followed by masses of inky night. Then we stopped at a Canadian city station. I pushed up the window, and heard the great French chatter that went on outside. Not a word of English could I pick out, neither did I want to hear such a word. It would have spoiled all. At last I was in a new country, among a people who spoke a different language from my own! I was a real traveler at last!

At ten o’clock the lights of Montreal, strings of stars, flashed by the windows. Three miles away from the station the passengers became restless. Some of them stood up and waited during all that time. At last the brakeman called out with finality, a downward deflection of the last syllable, as if that ended his day, “Mon-tree-AL!”

There my ticket told me I should have to change. The next stage of my journey would take me along the border of Canada as far as Detroit; an all-night journey.

[10]During the hour that I had to wait in Montreal, I went on a thrilling, timid sight-seeing. I recollect to have seen a couple of dim-lit business streets, silent, ghostly, a couple of buildings which must have been structures of importance in daylight, and a sign which could be read because it was directly in the glare of an arc light, “National Bank.” Having seen so much, and satisfied my provincial soul on so spare a meal, I went back to get on my new train.

I found myself in a most comfortable car. The seat was well padded, the back was high enough to serve for a pillow, and there was no one in the seat in front. So I turned over that seat, took off my coat and hat, unlaced my shoes and put them on one side, leaned back with a sigh of content, ready for a night’s rest when—the conductor came down the aisle, looked at my ticket, and said, “This is a first-class car and you have a second class ticket. The next car ahead, sir!”

I slung my coat over my arm, picked up my shoes and suit-case and went into the car ahead. It was a Tourist Sleeping car and was filled, largely, with a medley of Europeans. Europeans, too, with peasant manners, with peasant dirt and peasant breath. There was odor of garlic mixed with odor of stale rye bread, as some ate lunches. There was odor of unwashed clothes mixed with odor of sour milk. Double seats, leather padded, had been pushed together[11] into berths, while overhead shelves had been let down for upper berths, with thin pads of mattress for the colonists to find rest upon. The aisles were littered with paper, fruit remnants, broken cigarette stubs, empty bottles, and expectoration. The air was vapid, like a drunkard’s breath. I waded through it all to the lower end of the car where there seemed to be an oasis of cleanliness and order. Here, though, were men sprawled out in unpoetic postures of sleep. At the lowest end, even the train boy had left his basket of fruit and soda on one side, while he lay for the night, crumpled up, snorting like a pig.

I looked around and up for a place to sleep. There on one of the high shelves, I saw a young fellow sitting up, eating a sandwich. He saw me looking in his direction. “Hello, fellow,” he greeted cheerily, “you’re English, aren’t you, fellow?” I replied that I was and that I was wanting a place to sleep for the night. He said, “These places are for two. Get a leg up and bunk with me.” He reached down his hand, braced me as I stood on the edge of a lower berth, and then I found myself in the bed with my benefactor.

He sat there in his shirt, ready for bed, with a large basket of sandwiches in front of him. There were more sandwiches together in that one basket than I have ever seen piled up on the counter of any lunch room.

[12]“You aren’t a train boy, are you?” I asked. “Oh, no,” said the young fellow, “that’s my lunch. I got a week’s go on the trains yet, so I brought enough to eat for that time. I’m going to college away out West. Have one,” he broke in and pointed to the basket. I had no scruples in assisting at the reduction of such a mountain of sandwiches, for I imagined that a company of soldiers could have subsisted on them for three days. I ate my fill, and the young fellow watched me with evident delight. “I’m going out to college, too,” I explained. “We’re birds of a feather, eh?” “What college?” he asked. “Evangelical University,” I replied. “It’s easy to get through there because expenses are moderate. I don’t think I’ll have a chance to get in right away,” I explained. “You see, I haven’t written them that I’m coming or asked for a chance even. I can get out there and get some kind of work, and when everything’s arranged, get into the University. A friend told me about it.”

“Why didn’t you go back with some one?” asked my friend. “Well, you see,” I answered, “I couldn’t afford to go the way the others go. It costs twenty-four dollars and this route only costs me fifteen dollars and sixty-five cents.” “Oh,” said the young fellow. “When you do enter the University what class will you join?” “I’ll have to join the beginners with common school branches,” I said. “Then[13] I’ll work up into the Academic course to prepare for college, then go through college, you see.” “Oh, yes,” he said, “I see.” He then asked me to help myself to another sandwich. “You’ve got nerve, anyway,” he commented. “It’ll be a long pull, won’t it, to do what you plan? How old are you?” “Oh, around twenty,” I answered. “I wish, for your sake,” said the young man, “that you were through with it; this education business takes a lot out of a fellow. It’s a fight right from the start if you don’t have any money. I’m a sophomore in college. By the way, you haven’t told me your name, fellow. Mine’s Harlan M. N. I. Droughtwell. Plenty of initials because my folks wanted to please both branches of the family. In full, I am Harlan Micknell Norman Ingraham Droughtwell.” “And I,” I replied, “am just Al Priddy. No middle name. I suppose, though, that really I am Albert, but it ain’t used much.”

Harlan put the basket aside, after having put over the bread a damp towel and closed the cover. Then he told me to turn in near him. So we both gave ourselves into the keeping of the engineer and slept profoundly above the odors, the litter, the droning aliens:—two youths college bound.

I was first up, in the morning. Harlan, on opening his eyes, proposed that I “dive in” and he pointed to the sandwiches. First of[14] all I wanted to wash my face. I did so at the drinking tank. I looked around. There was a stirring among the aliens; just a stirring. Some were turning over, yawning and giving guttural explosions of sleepy comment. Mothers were feeding hungry, lively babies; but at my end everything was profoundly still. The train boy’s basket was still where I had seen it the night before with the fruit exposed to the air. The boy himself was a tousled, sleepy, uninspiring bundle of blue and white. I looked at my berth-mate, the sandwich man, and noted that he combed his hair from the side. Immediately I was conscious that I combed mine down the middle, and I recollected that my aunt Millie had always said that I looked like a masher with it in that way. So I took out my pocket comb and changed the style of my hair-dressing, while Harlan, entirely unconscious of having wielded so powerful an influence over a fellow, sat in his berth and struggled with his clothes.

All through the morning we traveled; over high trestles, through deep cuts, skirting tobacco fields, whirling through little settlements until at last we were rolled to the deck of a massive iron ferry and, still in the cars, were taken across the lake and landed at Detroit. Meanwhile, I had parted company with Harlan, who had told me to “keep right at it,” meaning thereby, a college education.

[15]Transfer after transfer was made for another night and a day, each time the trains seemed to get slower, to stop more at stations, while the cities grew less frequent. Friday turned into Saturday, Saturday into Sunday, and by Sunday, too, we plunged into an overpowering odor of gas. “Is the lamp leaking?” I asked the trainman mournfully. “It’s terrible. It must be leaking. It makes me seasick.” The man laughed. “Oh, you’re in the gas belt,” he said. “It’s in the air. You will get used to it. I can’t smell it at all, though at first it smells like being right in a gas house, doesn’t it?”

The gas tinged everything; food and drink. I felt like going to sleep to lose the sense of it. But deeper and deeper into it the train plunged, without mercy. “If you’ve got a piece of silver about you,” said the trainman, “a watch-chain or anything of gold or silver, this air will turn it black soon enough. But you’ll get used to it,” he added comfortingly enough. “I shall have to,” I complained, gloomily. “It tastes as if all the gas works in the world had exploded about here.”

Finally I was nearing Groat’s Crossing, the seat of Evangelical University. The train deposited me at a station within twelve miles of it, where I should have to take an accommodation four hours later. There was nothing to see in the place where I waited, but glaring brick buildings and houses on stilts. So I waited[16] around the hot, splintered platform, seated now on a truck, watching a group of young men reading sections of a Sunday paper, or walking miserably up and down wishing for the train, for the gas had gotten into my system, and I felt lonesome, miserable. I might have gone to sleep in the waiting room, but the seats were spoiled for beds by having iron arm rests at intervals of two feet. I tried to thread myself through these, at full length, but could not. There was nothing to do, but stand around and taste gas, until the Groat’s Crossing train came.

With great joy I watched the accommodation come into the station. Only twelve more miles between me and Evangelical University! The end of three days’ travel. Three days from the cotton mills! In that thought I renewed my spirit. Soon I should at least be NEAR a college!

College! For me! It was the anticipation of a first watch twenty times intensified. I, go to college! Look back in the genealogies of the Priddys, rooted back in Britain’s centuries, and lay your finger on a single member of it who ever went beyond the secondary school! And there was the brakeman calling, inconsequently, “Groat’s Crossing!”

I half stumbled from that car, thanking God that He had allowed me this sweet day. Here I was on the platform at last. There was no[17] one about. A Sabbath quiet lingered over everything. The black splinters on the platform went like knife blades between the soles of my worn shoes.

Groat’s was a very small station. Some sort of a village lay behind it. I asked a man on the street corner if this was where Evangelical University could be found. He pointed away from the village in the direction of a rutted, clay road bordered by a line of houses on stilts which ended in a pasture fence made from dry stumps interlocked. “The place’s up thar!” mumbled the man as he moved the morsel of tobacco from one cheek to the other. “You’ll run smack inter it ef yo’ keeps ergoin’.” “How far about?” I asked. “Uh, ’bout a mile or mo’, I guess.”

The fumes of gas half choked me. They drowned out the perfumes from decaying leaves which lay thick on the streets. It was a land given over to gas, evidently, for instead of cows grazing in the flat pastures, latticed derricks towered over oil and gas wells. In place of the twitter of Fall songsters reaching me from the trees along the roadside, came the mournful creaking of oil pumps and the gasps and barks from the sputtering engines. A well had just been shot. A crowd of spectators stood at the base of a derrick whose latticework glistened with the black baptism of oil, and the dead grass on which the spectators stood was soaked[18] by a tarry iridescence; the thick, black, greasy mess which had spouted up from the torn heart of the underworld.

I walked along a board walk which gave me a level path over little brooks, open culverts, house drains, and masses of surface gas mains. It took me up a slight grade in a lonesome part of the road where were neither houses nor trees. I stood on the crest of the hill looking ahead for the University. It stood on the open plain ahead of me, in full sight, Evangelical University!

I had never seen a college before. I had feasted my imagination on photographs of the world’s leading universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Harvard. I had revelled in the Tom Brown type of literature which has for its background armorial gateways, ivy-clothed turrets in which sparrows twitter all the day; which showed myriads of mullioned windows peeping shyly through the branches of sedate, century oaks; which showed grassy-carpeted lawns, yew gardens, swans breasting placid, rose-fringed lakes, lakes girded by pebbled paths whereon walked pale, lanky scholars in board caps and mourning gowns, walking with bulky tomes of Latin on their palms in serene meditation!

And there the reality of a college, Evangelical University, spread itself for my contemplation, a heart-choked contemplation, because[19] that view shattered a lifetime’s romance! It brought to mind a group of tenements surrounding a big square, brick grammar school. The buildings stood open to the glare of the sun, for there were no tall trees for shade. The smaller houses, little cheaply constructed cottages, stood on cedar posts and were so fragile that the first tempest might readily twist them from their anchorages and carry them tumbling down the fields like empty hat-boxes.

After the armorial-gatewayed universities of my dreams had completely melted away, and the reality in its Puritan, pioneer severity challenged me, I took a firm hold on my slate-colored baggage and strode rapidly on towards my goal.

“What do you want for ninety dollars a year?” I argued with myself. “It’s your chance, and that’s enough.”

I soon came to a newly plowed road which led to the first of the university buildings. The hot sun had not been thirsty enough to suck all the rain which had fallen on the new road in the last storm. The clayey earth had mixed with it and formed a broth which waited for the first unwary foot to slip from the springy board walk, which led over it.

Directly ahead, I saw a salmon-colored, clapboarded building squat and frail like an evangelist’s tabernacle, over which I read on a sign the following explanatory inscription:

[20]

“Chief Pungo Hall, 1889.
Born in Africa. Died Here 1885.”

With but a mere glance at this Memorial Dormitory, I had need next to press my teeth over my under lip, stiffen my gait, bulge out my chest, and perform all the other affectations of courage, for in front of Pungo Hall stood a group of well-dressed young men, all looking at me! The heart of the horseman who dashed in the charge of the Six Hundred was a stouter one in feeling than mine when I charged on those lolling young men. My kneecaps vibrated like a cello string. My finger nerves leaped one over the other. My heart pumped double quantity of blood to my cheeks. The board walk dropped from under my shoes and I walked on a tipping cloud.

One of the students, in response to my waiting and my embarrassment, which must have been as clear to him as an electric advertisement over a skyscraper, advanced and asked if he could be of any service to me, saying that his name was Thropper, James Thropper.

Now, during the long, three days’ journey, I had spent much thought in preparation of the introduction of myself to the University upon arrival. I had succeeded in framing an introduction which had both the qualities of completeness and brevity. I had rehearsed it, mentally, in many hypothetical contingencies,[21] so that I might let them see that I knew, definitely, what I had come for. But among all the contingencies I had invented not one of them had resembled the one in which I found myself: making my business known to a student. I had thought of meeting with a gowned don or a “bursar”—whatever he was—because I was saturated with Tom Brown. But I managed to explode my introduction to the student, with all its brevity, in all its boyish completeness.

“My name is Al Priddy. I have come from the mills. I have not been to school beyond common fractions. I am nineteen years old. I am willing to learn. I heard of this place from a friend. He said there was a chance. I have only three dollars. I am willing to work. If you think I can’t be taken in, right off, I shall be happy to live near here, so that when I have earned more money I can begin!”

James Thropper picked up my slate-colored suit-case and led me before the group of students, without comment. Then, after he had introduced me to them all, as “Brother Priddy,” he signalled to a tall, moustached German. “Come here, Brock.” The German came to one side, and Thropper repeated, though not so completely nor with equal brevity, the tale I had unfolded.

“You’ve come to just the right place, Brother Priddy,” said Brock. “We have plenty of[22] students here who arrive without much money or much education. It’s a splendid place for getting a start, isn’t it, Brother Thropper?”

Thropper said, “It’s been a blessing to many a struggler.”

“But is there room?” I asked. “I could wait. It will be nice to live so near a college and join it—later,” I tremblingly ventured. “I didn’t come with the expectation of beginning studies right off, I thought I might go to work in the glass factory a while and then when I’d—”

“That would be a waste of time,” said Brock. “I think you’ll be able to start right away.”

“Excuse me—are—are you a professor—sir?” I enquired.

“No,” laughed Brock, “just a theologue, that’s all. I started late, you see.” Then he explained: “You’ll not be able to do any business here on Sunday. The President will see you the first thing in the morning; but you needn’t fear. There’s no turning of you off when you’ve come so far. Just remember that, Brother Priddy. Meanwhile, I think I might be able to place you at a job that will pay your board.”

With a wild leap of the heart, I gasped, thrilled,

“Oh, if you only could!”

“I’m head waiter in the dining-room,” he explained, “we have a place not filled yet.[23] I’ll see you later about it. Better take him in with you,” he announced, turning to Thropper. “Yours is a double room. That’s where the President would put him, anyhow.”

“My, the gas does smell!” I announced, merely to say something as Thropper led me into the dimness of Pungo Hall. “Doesn’t it spoil the food, when it soaks in it?”

Thropper laughed.

“You won’t mind it, after a while. You’ll get so that you won’t notice it. Here’s the room, ‘9’. Come in, Priddy!”

I heard the scraping of a key against the lock, a frosty light overhead showed me where the transom was swung at an angle. Finally there came a click as the key snapped back the bolt, Thropper threw back the door and ushered me in my college room, a double room within a narrow compass of a few feet something. I swept a pair of greedy eyes over this, the first substantial step in my educational ambition.

[24]

## Chapter II. I Help a Real
Poet to Sing his Hymn. My
First Chance and How I Succeeded
with it

THE double bed had two depressions plainly visible on the mattress where two previous occupants had maintained their respective sleeping rights. The double quilt, patterned after a gaudy Chinese puzzle, sank into the depressions of its own, warm weight.

“The best thing about that quilt,” explained Thropper, “is that when my eyes get weary with study or tired from writing, I look at the combinations of colors, and my eyes are rested. It’s great for that. By the way, I’ll call you Al if you’ll call me Jim,” he suggested.

That bed occupied the major portion of the floor. Its edge left just a narrow alley between it and two kitchen tables that were covered with black oil-cloth. One of the tables—farthest from the window, in the dim light,—was bare of books, and Jim said that it would be[25] mine. The other had about a dozen text books on it, some scraps of paper, and an open Bible, marked with purple and red ink where Jim told me he was busy emphasizing all the texts that he might preach sermons from—some day.

The chair allotted me was a plain kitchen affair, as hard as a tombstone; but Jim’s was fearfully and wonderfully stuffed. There it stood like a parody on a fluffy Morris, library chair. It was a kitchen chair grotesquely stuffed and upholstered within a faded, torn, and highly colored bed comforter. When Jim noted that I took an interest in it, he said,

“Padding made quite a difference in that chair, Al. It’s real comfortable, though there isn’t much seat left; it’s so thickly padded. I was out in the fields one day, and near the fence I picked up a sheep’s skin of thick wool. I thought then that I could make good use of it, so I brought it back, left it on the clothes-line at the back of the building to let the air sweeten it, for it was pretty strong; then I came to the conclusion that I could use it to stuff the chair—real wool, you know. The comforter was left in the back room by a fellow and I used that, too. It’s a real comfortable chair; almost makes you fall asleep when you sit in it.”

“You didn’t manage to sweeten all of the wool, did you, Jim?” I asked dubiously as I noted the dank odor that came from the chair;[26] an odor that was reminiscent of a junk shop after a rain.

“Why,” replied Jim, in good humor, “I don’t notice it a bit. I think it must be your imagination.”

“Well,” I concluded, ungraciously, “probably it’s like the gas. You’ve got used to it.”

Between the gas stove and the wash stand stood a galvanized water pail, three-quarters filled and with a fuzzy growth on its oily surface.

“That ain’t drinking water, is it?” I asked in alarm.

“No,” laughed Jim. “That’s in case of fire. I ought to have changed that water two weeks ago, but I guess I’m getting lazy.”

By this time I had my coat off and had accepted Jim’s invitation to wash the train dust off my face.

For this purpose I scraped around in the soap dish until I had secured two thin wafers of soap, one a transparent reminder of perfumed toilet soap, the other a dull yellow, and odorous with naphtha, which I recognized as the remnant of a powerful disinfecting and wash-day soap; used by my Aunt to drive black oil from overalls. I had to rub these two antagonistic wafers together to make sufficient lather for washing. Then, too, I had to hurry my toilet, for the flowered wash bowl[27] had a yellow crack on its under side, through which the water dripped rapidly while I washed.

Jim said,

“Until you get some, Al, you must use my towel.” He took it down from the wire behind the stove and let me have it, with the remark:

“There’s a dry corner, there near the fringe.”

The window was open, and while I was busy brushing the dust from my clothes, a gust of wind came in and I heard a rip on the wall followed by an exclamation from Jim,

“There it goes again! The wall will be going next!”

On examination I found that the wall paper, with its highly conventionalized lotus leaves, had lost its grip on the wall behind the gas stove and had uncovered a great area of plastered wall. Jim produced some tacks, and using a flat-iron for a hammer managed to return the paper to its place and to keep it anchored there through a liberal use of tacks.

He apologized, when he came down to the floor,

“All this is miserable enough, Al, and I don’t blame you for thinking so.”

“Uh,” I retorted, “I ain’t grumbling. Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, I don’t see what more the college can do for ninety dollars a year, board, room, and teaching.”

“‘Tuition’ you ought to say,” corrected Jim. “I’m glad you’ve got the right spirit[28] about this place, Al. You’re right, we can’t expect any more for ninety dollars! I don’t see how they can do for us what they can. It’s worth a mighty lot for you and me to get a chance, and if education should cost more, where would you and I be?”

“That’s just what I think!” I replied with spirit. “It is just the chance we want. Here I am, with only three dollars to begin on and a poor foundation for study in the bargain. What other place is there where I could be given a start on such easy terms?”

“A lot of fellows come here,” commented Jim, “who don’t look at the matter in that way—and they soon leave and don’t have any chance at all. I know you’ll appreciate the hard scrabble to get the education. Besides, poor buildings, poverty-stricken rooms, cheap board, and limited privileges ought to make us get the most out of our studies. That’s something.”

“But suppose they don’t let me begin?” I gasped; for up to this time I had not let a doubt of my acceptance at Evangelical University mar the afternoon.

“I don’t think they’ll let a fellow like you go begging, Al,” responded Jim. “You might as well count yourself one of us, right off.”

Just then, out in the upper end of the corridor, went up a high, lisping, effeminate voice, calling,

[29]“Oh, Brother Thropper; Brother Thropper!”

Jim went to the door and replied,

“All right, Jason!” Then he turned to me and whispered,

“Hardwick is one of the smartest fellows in the University. He’s a poet, too. He’s got a hymn set to music in this book,” and he waved a much worn, manila paper covered Gospel hymn book. “It’s very popular; sung in many of the big revivals!”

With a throb of excitement I waited for the advent of this real poet. I had seen men who had called themselves poets in the mill; but their productions were local in theme, personal in lines, unpoetic in metre and never reached a further fame than insertion in the “Original Line” column of the papers. But I was now to view a real poet; one whose words were sung in churches. I was thoroughly subdued when I heard the poet’s fingers searching for the knob, outside.

He was all that the comic papers and the actors suggest for poets. There was not a bit of the world about his aspect. In reaching for the dwelling places of the muses he had lengthened out until his head, covered with a thick cluster of curls, roamed through the higher levels of the atmosphere. He had to incline his head in order to get through the doorway. His face had a poetic paleness and his lips were pulled out as if he were on the verge[30] of inspired speech. He wore a clerical vest and all his clothes were of a very spiritual black. He carried a mandolin.

I was formally introduced and on my part, in acknowledging the introduction, I agreed that I was “right glad to know” Mr. Hardwick.

The poet had come to rehearse some hymns with Jim. The latter produced his guitar; both musicians sat on the edge of the bed before a nickel-plated music stand, the Gospel hymn book was put in place, and to the strumming of the instruments, the vocalists sang some revival hymns with such effect as to produce from me the comment, “My, that sounds fine!”

Then, growing bold through intimacy, I said,

“I wonder, Mr. Hardwick, if you will sing that song you wrote, please?”

The poet said that he would be pleased to sing it as a trio, and asked me, when he had found the place, if I could join in with the bass. I thought I could.

So the three of us, I between the two musicians, sat on the edge of the bed and sang the lilting reiterations of the hymn,

“There’s a welcome home,
There’s a welcome home,
There’s a welcome home,
For you and me.”

We were interrupted by the ringing of a bell, on the University tower, which, I learned, was the call to the Sunday afternoon preaching[31] service. As my roommate was trying to urge me to attend, and while I was protesting that my clothes were not good enough, the head waiter came into the room and said,

“Priddy, I’m going to give you a try as a waiter at supper. Don’t go to the preaching service. I will try to rig you up with an apron and jacket.”

Oh, what inspiration those words had in them! It meant that the University was already willing to give me a chance to show what I could do. I should not have to get work in the glass factory. I should not have to wait before I could enroll myself in the University. My chance had come. I cried for joy; tears of which I was not ashamed, even though Brock, the head waiter, saw them.

“I’m only poor, and a big blunderer, without any manners,” I protested, “but if you give me a chance, I’ll do my utmost.”

At five o’clock Brock came into the room carrying on his arm a well-starched waiter’s jacket and a patched white apron.

“I had these on the side,” he announced. “They are worth forty cents. You may pay for them when you are able. Don’t be worrying about the matter. Be over at the dining-room at quarter past five.”

After that I moved as if in the midst of a grand dream. Was I actually in a dormitory, at a college? Was it true that in a quarter of[32] an hour I should be trying to wait on a group of real students?

The dining-hall was a squat wooden bungalow with a great many windows in it. The front hall floor bent under my weight as I crossed it. I unlatched one of the double doors and viewed the roomful of tables with the dull reflector lamps hanging above them. White jacketed students were busy with plates and plated silver cutlery. Brock, himself in glorious white, came down the room with a word of greeting. I was introduced to the student-waiters, was told that I was on trial only, and that I should be carefully watched, as there were many trained waiters among the students who coveted the position. Brock indicated two tables near the door, the farthest away from the kitchen of all the tables.

“You will wait on them,” he said. “There will be ten to a table. When they come in, before the blessing, they will stand behind their chairs. You must go around, find out what they want to drink; hot water, tea or cold water, then you must go to the other end of the room, get one of the trays and fill it with twenty cups. Then you must get them served just as soon as you can. You will find plenty of chores to do when they are seated.”

With a wild, thumping heart, and with a maximum of terror, I heard the first of the students enter the outer hall. Brock stood at[33] the opposite end of the room, near the slides that connected with the kitchen, his finger on a Sunday-school bell. The students, well-dressed young men and women, swept past me, crowded me, stared at me, stood at my tables; went to the different parts of the room chattering, bantering, laughing, and accosting one another familiarly with such abandon and effect that I felt like an intruder. No one spoke to me. The young men and women at my two tables commented about something in a low murmur. They cast doubting looks toward me.

For a minute I was in a panic, then, because I was tall, I could see Brock’s eyes telling me to do something. I went through the crowded aisles, around my tables, saying to each person, in a trembling, very English way,

“Will you ’ave ’ot, cold water, or tea, please?”

I received eighteen orders for hot water and tea and two orders for cold water. I came out from the ordeal of having addressed so many students and went perspiring to the upper end of the room where the urns and trays were. I put the weighty cups and the thick glasses on a tray the size of an ordinary five o’clock tea table, filled them by twisting the tray under the spigots of the urns, and with the weighty load raised as high as my long arms could exalt it, pushed my way nervously down the aisle, past the students whose backs were turned to me, and conscious that all the inquisitive and[34] critical eyes in the world were watching me to see how I should manage. I was very fortunate in being able to squirm my way to the lower end of the room and to reach the vicinity of my own tables without accident. It helped me, too, to hear the students singing a hymn. It took their minds off me, the green mill boy trying to wait on college tables! Thus encouraged, I tried a bold thing, which I saw the other waiters doing. As there were no stand tables to rest our trays upon, while steadying mine against my body as it lay on the palm of my hand, I took off a cup of hot water from the lowered tray, and tried to reach the cup around the waist of the young woman who had called for hot water. The balance would have been maintained had not the person next to me suddenly drawn back, jolted the tray from my hand, and sent the hot liquids streaming down the skirts and shoes of those in the vicinity. There followed, too, the crash and thump as the heavy cups clattered to the floor. The two glasses splintered into bits, and while the students were sitting down, I found myself growing more and more conspicuous until the seated throng looked up from every part of the room, to see me furiously red, with tears gathering, and with untold chagrin over the mishap.

I waited, among the ruin, for Brock to come to me, get me by the scruff of the neck, hurl me outside to say,

[35]“Get back to the mill. What right have you to pretend to know how to act among cultured people? You’re too green!”

I imagined, too, that the students at my table must be delegating one of their number to go to the head waiter to say,

“We don’t want that clumsy person bothering with us. He’s spoiled a couple of fine dresses and made a regular bothersome mess. Throw him out! Send him back to where he came from!”

But I had mistaken the temper of Evangelical University. Brock came down, and with great kindness patted me on the back and said, encouragingly,

“Don’t let a thing like that bother you, Priddy. I know how they crowd. Cheer up, old fellow.”

Then the student who had jolted the tray bent back and said,

“It was all my fault, Brock. He wasn’t to blame a bit. It was downright careless of me. I’m sorry.”

Then, after he had assisted me in bringing the hot water and other drinkables to the tables, Brock took pains to introduce me to the twenty young men and women, saying,

“Mr. Priddy, I hope, will see that you do not go hungry as much as you might!”

I walked on air after that; for the head waiter had called me, “Mr. Priddy!”

[36]

## Chapter III. Thropper’s Puff
Tie. Sounds That Passed in the
Night. The Possible Advantages
of Speaking Tubes. The Scroll of
Divine History. The Meditations
of a Saint. How Thropper
Lost his Pious Reputation

SHORTLY after my return from the dining-hall, Thropper thundered into the room, in his impetuous way, jerked his arms out of his coat, tore at his collar and lifted up the lid of his tin-covered trunk with every evidence of excitement.

“What’s the matter—Jim?” I asked, from my seat near the window.

“Got a date on, that’s what,” he answered, half smothered in his trunk. “Miss Ebberd’s going—church—with me. Lucky—duck, that’s what! Going down the board walk to—New Light revival! Say,” he interrupted, holding up for my inspection a black, puff tie,[37] with an opal stone nesting in the midst of its folds, “How would this go with a choker collar, Priddy?”

“Put it on first, Thropper,” I suggested.

He fastened it around his high choker collar: a collar whose pointed fronts might have been successfully used by Spanish Inquisitors to make heretics look up continually unless they wished to have holes punctured under their chins.

“The reason I wear this tie,” said Thropper, confidentially, “is because it blocks up my shirt bosom; hides it and saves washing, of course. You’ve got to get on to all those sort of tricks when you work your way through school, you’ll find, Priddy. Now, how do I look, eh?”

I thought him a very attractive Lothario indeed, although I did not venture so far with an expression of opinion. I merely said,

“You look slick!”

As he was leaving the room, Thropper suddenly turned and in a very apologetic tone said,

“I had planned, Priddy, to stay with you tonight, but you see how it is, don’t you, old fellow?”

“Why, certainly,” I agreed. “I wouldn’t like to have you miss this chance for anything, Thropper. Go ahead and good luck!”

“Thanks,” he said. “You can lock the door when you go to bed if I’m not back. You must be tired!”

[38]“Yes, I am tired, Thropper. I’ll sit by the window—and think. Good luck to you!”

He was gone. As his feet echoed in the bare hall, I heard him humming, like a happy lover,

“There’ll be no dark valley!”

The evening shadows were gathering outside, as I sat near the window, looking out. From the village centre came the drawn out stroke of a church bell. Then the campus was alive with sounds. The whole University seemed astir. Some one raised up a window in the second story, over my head, and a quiet, vibrant voice called, “Hey, Brother Merritt?” The man in the next room stopped his strumming on a guitar, lifted up his window and replied, “What?” “Going to the service tonight, Brother Merritt?” To which my neighbor answered, “No, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m tired.” A door in the next house burst open and a trio of young women gathered on the porch. “That’s only the first bell,” said one. “We shan’t have to hurry.” “I’m glad of that,” replied another, “for the board walk is just simply terrible in places: full of holes that we might trip in if we had to run.” Then their pattering footfalls could be heard growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance on the board walk. Little groups of young men hummed hymns as they, too, passed Pungo Hall on their way to the revival. Others laughed and argued.[39] I heard the fragment of one discussion in which three earnest-toned young men were indulging: “Saint Paul did make a failure in that Mar’s Hill speech!” said one, loudly. “It all depends on what you mean by ‘failure,’” replied his antagonist; “true, the Greeks might not have been strongly enthusiastic at the time, but it seems to me that God would use that speech for—No!” The argument was swallowed up in the twilight and the distance. A group of young women swept by the gloom which hung like a mystic veil between me and them. I heard only one sentence of their conversation, “Fried potatoes—ugh!” They were succeeded by a procession of late starters who slipped by shrouded in the gloom, a happy, familiar, shadowy procession ignorant of the lonesome lad who sat back of a window and envied them their evening’s excursion. The last of the footsteps died down on the board walk, as if the last of my generation had left me to occupy the world alone. But the stars came out for friendliness, ruling over the silences of the campus and rendering it more silent. The tolls of the church bell announced the beginning of the service. When the double stroke had been given for a last warning, the silence was about me once more. Suddenly the troubled cry of a sheep from the back pasture broke out on the night, a plaintive bleat as if a dog or some prowling beast of prey had been[40] scented. Then, through an open window in the next house, I heard the voice of a girl as it read something, followed by a deeper voice which said, “Oh, yum, I’ve been dozing, Grace!” That was followed by a hand which drew apart the curtains, and soon two girls’ heads were outlined against the golden glow in the room, and one remarked, “Oh, what a stupid night!” I hurriedly dodged my head into the room, drew down the window shade and lighted the flaring, hissing blaze of gas.

The whole room was cheapened when the powerful gas light shone on it. The crowded space, filled with the tawdry effects of my roommate and myself: the rack of dusty photographs of people I had never seen, the stuffed chair, the bed quilt, the water bucket; all those things oppressed me. I turned off the light and threw myself on the bed determined not to undress till Thropper’s return. I felt the need of Thropper. It seemed to me that he would cheer me, hearten me, be a companion. I began to speculate about Thropper in a dreamy sort of way. Overhead, some one began to walk back and forth, back and forth, monotonously, humming a tune unknown to me. I listened for the melody hoping to discover that it would be something with which I was familiar, so that I could hum it too. But it was suddenly interrupted by a terrific yawn. Then the man upstairs said, “Oh, Oh-h-h!” and I heard the clatter as[41] a pair of shoes fell on the floor. The man was going to bed. I began to wonder who it was that had been walking and singing and going to bed over my head. I also speculated on the social value of a speaking tube which should connect our rooms. Then a long, long silence, broken at last by a clatter in the hallway and at last Thropper’s cheery voice,

“Well, you couldn’t wait to undress, eh, Priddy?”

“Oh,” I mumbled, “got back?”

“Yes,” he laughed. “Isn’t it time?”

“What time is it?”

“Nearly ten.”

“I must have been asleep, Thropper. The sounds sent me off.”

“You were homesick, I’ll bet,” he laughed. “That’s a fine description of it.”

“It wouldn’t be surprising, would it?” I asked.

“Not a bit,” he said, “but you just wait till you get to know the folks about here, and you’ll get over that.”

“Did you have a good service, Thropper?”

“Oh, fair,” he replied. “Fair. Miss Ebberds didn’t particularly like the sermon.”

“But she enjoyed the walk to and from it,” I laughed.

“Well,” he said earnestly, “I know I did.”

While he was preparing himself for bed, he said,

[42]“When I went out I forgot to tell you about the Scroll. You might have had a good time with it. Have you ever seen one?”

“Scroll?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

Thropper plunged into the heart of his trunk again, and this time extracted a black, leather case. He opened the front, turned a knob and unfolded a scriptural panorama of chromo pictures, depicting the thrilling events which took place in Eden, first of all, and then continuing through the murder of Abel to the Flood.

“I was agent for this last summer,” said Thropper. “Look through it, Priddy, it’s quite interesting.”

The Scroll had unfolded to Sinai accompanied by a running comment by Thropper, which, itself, was a panorama of the exciting adventures of a Scroll agent, when he heaved a sigh and said,

“Oh, um!”

I looked up in time to see him throw himself on his knees at the bed-side, to bend his head in a cup made by his hands, for his evening prayer.

The Scroll brought before me the Tabernacle, the Temple, the victory of David over the Giant in the midst of a profound silence. Thropper was still engaged in his devotions as[43] devoutly, as deeply, as any Augustinian monk. The panorama of the Divine Plan unfolded the adventures which befell the prophets and came at last to the Birth of Christ, when I looked around again to find Thropper still kneeling at the bed-side. To me it was a display of the prayer-spirit unusual and I was just investing my roommate with all the pious dignity of a Saint, when a loud, long-drawn snore came from him. He had fallen asleep! I shook him. He drawled, as he crept into bed,

“I’m glad you wakened me, Priddy. I fall asleep quite often. One night I nearly got frozen to death. I didn’t have a roommate. Thanks. Turn off the light, won’t you.”

After the Crucifixion I closed the Scroll and snuggled into bed with Thropper. My first day in Evangelical University had ended.

[44]

## Chapter IV. Thundering Gymnastics.
How to Keep on the
Good Side of the Young Women
with Scriptural Quotations. The
Establishment of Friendship.
Carrying Water for Beauty.
How Music may be Something
More than Music. The Wonderful,
Austere Man that Thropper
Led me to

I LINKED myself to the following day’s life by clutching the gaudy comforter in both my hands while I sat up in bed, startled by a thundering that shook Pungo Hall.

“What’s—that?” I gasped, turning towards Thropper, expecting to discover that the vibrations had brought him up in alarm.

“It’s only ‘Budd’ doing his gymnastics,” he muttered, drowsily, “what time?”

[45]“Six.”

“Better get up and go over to the dining-room at half-past,” he explained. “Say,” he added, lifting up his head, “you wouldn’t mind letting me know at twenty minutes past, would you, Priddy?”

“Not at all, Thropper.” He dropped half under the clothes and in a surprising manner was soon invested in all the dignity of thorough repose.

From that moment until the clamor of the rising bell, at half-past six, the heart of Pungo Hall was turned into a huge alarm clock, for first in this corner, then in that, on this floor and then on that, intermittent clatterings of clocks brought intermittent yawns and mutterings as the different students were signalled by their unsleeping timepieces. Every noise seemed to pierce from room to room as if it went through telegraphic sounding boards. Splashings, jumpings, muttered prayers, readings aloud, animated conversations: these increased as half-past six drew near. The Monday morning, with its new week of study, demanding a fresh enthusiasm after the Sabbath’s interruption, was not being approached in any business manner. Over the banister, leading to the top floor, a voice exclaimed, so that all could hear, “Say, Headstone, how fine you looked last night with Her!” To which an answer came from a suddenly opened door, “Thank you!” Then over that banister, into[46] the laundry basket, in a dark corner of the hall, the bed wash was hurled accompanied by dull thuds.

“Got your quotation?” asked Thropper, as he dressed.

“Quotation?”

“Yes, Bible verse for the tables. You’ll probably be asked to give one. You see, it’s a sort of custom for Bible verses to go the rounds of the tables, in the morning. You don’t have to have one, but it fits in nicely, if you have one. Especially if you’re a waiter.”

“Oh, of course I’ll take one,” I said.

“Only just remember and not do what one waiter did, Priddy: take that verse and quote it: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches.’ It would get you in wrong—with the young ladies.”

“Why?”

“Well, so many of them are going to be evangelists and ministers and missionaries: ever so many of them. You see how they would be liable to take it.”

“We had better keep on the good side of—the ladies,” I laughed.

Thropper winked.

“Betcher life,” he replied.

Just then the head waiter peeped in at the door to say,

“Brother Priddy, are you coming across to the dining-room? I’m going over.”

[47]Eager to face my responsibilities of the day in the leadership of somebody I accompanied the tall German across the road and into the dining-room.

“Black for breakfast and supper. White for dinner,” announced Brock. “I mean the kind of coats that are to be worn,” he explained.

While I arranged my two tables for twenty people with plates, knives and forks, milk in granite-ware pitchers, sliced bread, corn bread left over from the previous night’s meal, tomato butter, and dishes of crisp, browned, fried potatoes, the other waiters came in and greeted me with hearty,

“Morning’s!” “Howdy’s!” and “Hello, Priddy’s!” which had the effect of making me feel in strong fellowship with them, although our acquaintance was but a day and a night old, at the utmost. Brock smiled at all these evidences of friendship, and whispered, as he showed me how to arrange the breakfast things,

“Things are going well, eh?”

“Yes,” I muttered, “if I can manage not to drop another tray!”

Then the breakfast bell brought the hurried, chattering, hungry crowd of young men and women into the room again, though, at this meal, they were less formidable in their every-day clothes. Some brought books, others writing pads. Fountain pens and pencils projected[48] from the outer pockets of the men, and were stabbed in the hair of the women.

My tables were soon lined with students. They, too, seemed to have met me, long ago, in the remote past and to some of them I must have been at least a third cousin or present at a family party, so freely and lavishly did the greetings come: greetings that put me at my ease because I felt that they came from sincere hearts.

The floor was ready to bend under the weight of the crowd that stood waiting behind the chairs for Brock’s signal to sit. Like a stern, powerful, determining Ruler, the head waiter stood at the opposite end of the room, with his eye on his watch, not willing to press his thumb on the Sunday-School bell until the instant seven o’clock arrived. Eyes looked longingly on the hot, fried potatoes. It was no use. Seven o’clock was a minute off. Some rumbled the legs of the chairs. To no purpose. The German had patience. Finally the snap of the bell sent every man and woman to the table accompanied by the roar of scraping chairs, thumping feet, and expressions of satisfaction.

Near the head of my first table sat a very young, pink-cheeked Southern girl possessed of charming, gracious ways. Her “Mr. Priddy, please, a spoon,” was as musical as ever a request could be. It made me feel sorry that the spoon was not gold instead of German metal.[49] Consequently, when she asked me for a third glass of water during the first five minutes of breakfast, it was no small happiness for me to secure it, as speedily as possible, for her. But on my return with the third glass her neighbor asked for one. On my return with that, the Southern girl had her glass emptied. So it went for ten minutes: each one of them drinking amounts of water sufficient for ducks or geese to swim in—it seemed to me. Finally, on picking up a fork some one had let fall on the floor, I saw several glasses, full to the brim with water, under the Southern girl’s chair. She had been initiating me. With a broad wink at the others, I very slyly sprinkled some pepper on the glass of water before her when her head was turned and then waited for results. They soon came. She reached for her glass, took a sip, and then commenced to choke.

“What is the matter, miss?” I asked, “will you have some more water?”

She looked at me in resentful astonishment, at first, and then seeing that the others at the table were laughing, she joined in with them, saying,

“Who peppered the water?”

“Was there pepper in the water?” asked one across the table.

There the matter ended, although, when in a spirit of boastfulness I recounted the experience at the waiter’s table, Brock chided me by saying,

[50]“You will have to be careful. We must have discipline, brother Priddy!”

Thropper was waiting for me, after breakfast, when the call to chapel sounded: the first exercise of the day. We joined the procession of students which moved swiftly towards the central building. Into it the procession hurried, racing against the tolling of the bell. Then followed a tiresome climb up three pairs of stairs to the topmost room of all, used for a chapel. An attic room, square and dimly lighted by dormer windows. The roof girders overhead clung together like knitted arms bent on holding together such a load of humanity as trusted to them. Against the wall, opposite the door, spread a broad platform with a semi-circle of male and female faculty arrayed on it. Before it, and awed into respectful silence by it, spread a fan of students, sitting in chairs, by groups. I sat at the heart of Evangelical University. This chapel, in its plainness, its bareness, its poverty, formed the pivot on which the life of the University swung; for here the religious faith and doctrine which were the most eagerly sought gifts of the place were received. Here, in these simple chairs, was where men and women found God: the highest advertisement of the University.

The doors closed out late-comers. A hymn was sung. This has been said, and echoed many a time: that a hymn was sung. But this first[51] hymn I heard, proceeding from over a hundred hearts, should not be plainly, unemphatically said to have been merely sung. If each word be trebly underscored and trebly emphasized, then, one may say, a hymn was sung that morning, for to me, the first bar of melody seemed to be the onrush of an Angelic symphony through a suddenly opened door of Heaven! Were they common men and women who were singing with such resonant exultation! The boarded ceiling and the huge square attic room throbbed with it. Rapture, adoration, victory, joy unspeakable weighted down each note as the melody unfolded itself. The reliant basses, anchored to the background of the melody—a resonant, manly anchorage—made sudden excursions into the higher realms of the theme, but not to displace the tenors whose shrill praises were the nearest to what a hammer stroke on a bar of silver would produce. The dulcet altos, as rich depths of throat as any one might expect, entwined themselves in and out of the sopranos’ soaring, singing as if to keep those higher voices from too suddenly darting past the doors of Heaven and surprising God. That was no mere singing of a hymn. It was a hymn for the love of the hymn; singing for the pure love of singing. Or, better, a spiritual exercise that could certainly be no more willingly or much better done in a morning rehearsal of the Court melodists!

[52]“Wonderful!” I gasped to Thropper, whose tenor had added much to the dignity of that part.

“They do sing well, don’t they?” he commented.

A demure little woman in black, with a very set, white face, came to the reading desk and read a scripture lesson. Then the sober Dean, whose eyes knew every thought in that room and said so, gave some notices. There followed a prayer whose outstanding character was earnestness of expression, of theme, of length. Then the whole service was embroidered by three verses of another hymn, after which we fell in orderly lines and marched through the open doors, where an electric gong broke up the line into unorganized groups, scattering for the classrooms.

“Now for the President’s office,” announced Thropper, abruptly.

But a sudden pang of fear whipped across my thoughts.

“Oh, suppose I can’t enter, Thropper!” I exclaimed. “It has tasted so good, thus far!”

He patted me on the back, in his manly way, did Thropper, and heartened me by saying,

“Well, Priddy, if you like the first taste, I guess you’ll stay for the whole meal—if you are hungry!”

“Thanks, old fellow,” I said. “Take me to the President!”

[53]He led me downstairs into a very busy office where some young women were typewriting, inscribing books, and where one dudish young man with up-combed, wavy hair, was flirting with a pretty, tan-cheeked girl who was supposed to be engrossed in the task of trimming a window shelf of geraniums.

Thropper was told that the President was engaged and that we should have to wait our turn. So we sat in high-backed chairs, in line with three others, where I waited with a palpitating heart that began to spell panic if my turn were delayed much longer. To increase this threatened panic of courage, Thropper began to whisper terrible things about the President: how he was a wonderful reader of books and had a mentality and memory so well disciplined that he was able to read an entire page at a mere glance and be able to pass an exacting examination on its contents a day afterwards! Thropper also whispered in an awe-struck voice,

“The President just feeds on learning! He can speak in ten different languages, read in fifteen, about, and think in twelve: so they say. You mustn’t fool with him or tell him any funny stories! He’d never get over it, Priddy. Now, come on, it’s your turn. I’ll introduce you and leave you with him!”

My sensitive imagination enkindled by all that Thropper had fed me on, in the waiting[54] room, I appeared before the President considerably unnerved. He sat behind his desk, waiting for me: the embodiment of every austere report I had heard. His mouth twitched; twitched all the time. His eyes shone as brightly as those of an aroused lion from the dark mask of a cave. It was a race between his mouth and his eyes: the mouth slipped in and out, lip over lip, lip under and over lip, while those two small eyes snapped back and forth with electric suddenness. His gaunt features had the pallor of death. A world of woe, of hunger, of intellectual dissipation could be read in him. He tried to compose his features into a smile of welcome when he saw me, but it seemed so unusual a thing for those ascetic signs to be disturbed by the intrusion of anything pleasurable, that the first attempt ended in a sad failure. He did not try again. His voice was tired when he spoke. It had neither vibration nor health in it. I stood before that presence chilled, uninspired, while a strong temptation to flight pulled on my courage.

“Sir,” began Thropper, fingering his cap, “I’ve brought Mr. Priddy in. He came yesterday, and I’ve been letting him share my room till he saw you.”

“‘Had seen,’ you should say, sir,” corrected the President, “if you are after the proper tense of the verb. You may go.”

Thropper sighed deeply as he left, probably[55] over the grammatical correction just imposed on him.

A seat was indicated and I was asked to place myself in it. Then the President said,

“Just tell your story in your own way till I interrupt you, young man.”

Thereupon I went into such minute details about myself, that I soon brought from the official a grunt of impatience.

“No,” he said, “I’m not a bit eager to know how many times your family has moved about the country. I want to know the salient things about you yourself.”

“I’ve been working in the mill till last week,” I said. “I always have been eager to get an education. I haven’t been able to save any money. I heard about this place. I came on. If you can’t take me, then please let me live here; just live here, it will do me good even if I don’t take any studies. I can work out and earn my board, I promise you. I have been earning my own living for a long time now, sir.”

“How much money have you brought?” he asked.

“Three dollars,” I said. “But you don’t need to take me in yet, sir,” I explained, hurriedly, for I felt that he would surely turn me off.

“A young woman came here, last year, with just four cents in her pocket and only her own[56] strength to rely upon, young man,” replied the President. “Her own strength and God to rely upon, I should say, sir.”

“Yes?”

“There are several here who, at middle age, have arrived with wives and families and hardly more than enough to keep them a week, save their own strength and God’s.”

“Yes?”

“There is one student here who, at forty-five, has given up his position in business to begin in the lowest grade of study, with arithmetic, that he may receive an education.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So that you, with your youth, your three dollars, your opportunity, ought really to get along fairly well here.”

“If you take me, sir?”

“Do you think we would turn you off, young man?”

“You mean that you’ll give me a chance, then?” I cried, in great exultation at his quiet words.

At last a faint smile did untangle itself from his austere line.

“You are already earning your board in the dining-hall, I understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That leaves merely the small item of tuition and room rent. I think that you will be able to find enough work about the campus[57] and in the village to arrange for the payment of that. If not, you should be able to earn enough next summer to do it.”

“Just the thing, sir,” I cried. “I’ll do it! Here is the first payment.” I handed him the three dollars.

He waved his hand.

“Keep them for necessities,” he said. “There is no hurry. God is back of us, young man, and will raise up friends for us. I want you to work hard and make of yourself a useful man in the world. We have no luxuries here. It is plain living and high thinking: the two essential equipments of manhood, I believe. If you will share our hardships faithfully and work hard, we welcome you to us. That is all. Now we will see about your list of studies.”

After fifteen minutes’ appraisement of my intellectual attainments and of my intellectual aim, the President made me out a list of subjects with such diverse studies on it as: Beginning Grammar, Church history, elementary arithmetic, Jevon’s Logic, elementary Latin, typewriting and zoölogy! I hurried from the office, with the card, to attend my first class, the first real step in my higher education, the class in Church history!

[58]

## Chapter V. Pungo Hall’s Occupants:
Estes Who Planned to Take
a Tent and Plant it in the Midst
of the World’s Sin; of the Little
Man Who Fled from the Chidings
of a ‘D. D.’: of Calloused Hands
and Showing How ‘Pa’ Borden
was Beaten by the Grass Widower
with the Long Hair

EVERY scar that a sin may leave, every phase of ambition made possible in a democratic world, every type of dramatic character: these I found in Pungo Dormitory. As to a shelter from the world’s temptations had come firm-lipped, tense-browed men in middle life. As to the door which led into serviceable adventures, had come stout-hearted, finely-fibred but poor youths. Evangelical University meant more than a place where one could get a formal education.[59] To some it meant a haven from a rough sea: a sea so rough, indeed, that but for the harbor must have wrecked them inevitably.

The sea, for instance, on which Estes, in Number 18, had found such tempestuous experiences. To imagine Estes you have to think of two small, very glistening black eyes shining through a forest of beard like hut lights gleaming like faint stars in the midst of a dense grove. That was all you noticed, at first, about him, for his body was insignificant, unimportant. The little knobs of cheek that came between the eyes and the black beard shone with a dull red glow, like flesh that the winds and the frosts had hardened and tinted. When on the campus, Estes crowned his blackish head with a cow-boy’s sombrero, worn at a rakish, foppish slant, as if he were trying to be reminiscent of a Mexican señor. A man to be called merely a poseur when met on the campus or in the classroom, with his arithmetic, his grammar, his English history, and his black teacher’s Bible in the crook of his arm; a thirty-seven-year-old man with his foot on the first rung of the educational ladder. To most of the students he was known only in the rôle of “elementary student.” But in the confidence of his chamber, among his selected friends, when he opened his record, it was akin to the opening of furnace doors to show the furious white heat of a man’s sinful passion and the dark, twisting, sulphurous smoke of[60] criminal deceit. He had betrayed men and women in selfish conspiracies; had drowned his wit in seas of alcohol; had abandoned his mother and family to the cruelties of poverty and illness; had stolen money and honor from his fellows; had mixed in the cheap and petty evil sports of sailors and tramps; had roamed through the land in the guise of an Indian doctor selling watery and greasy medicaments under a hissing, gasolene torch to confiding purchasers; had held responsible positions in shops; had—there seemed to be no end to his adventures in which the coloring always turned out to be the fact that in all of them he had introduced elements of sin, of criminality, of cruelty. They always ended against those grim stone walls! After walking through the pages of several high-strung romances of vagabondage and clap-trap he had turned to Evangelical University as to the mould for a new character which was to form him over, not only into a socialized being, but into a serviceable, spiritual servant; for after he should have had ingrained on him the elementary knowledge of Grammar, Bible, and History, he planned to take a tent into the world, set it in the midst of the slums for a season, and nightly exhort bad men to become good with the same fervid impulsiveness with which he had formerly exhorted them, under the yellow blaze of gasolene lamps, to buy pills and medicine-cure-alls.

[61]In room “20” dwelt a student of an opposite type who embodied in an eloquent degree the strength and adventure to which ambition may attain. “Dr.” Upwell was a little north-of-Ireland Scotchman, past his forty-third summer: an ordained clergyman in an energetic denomination. He was one of those unfortunate men—of which there are a sad number in the pastorate—who, in a moment of illogical frailty had succumbed to the temptation which a letter offered, of securing for a trivial sum of dollars the dignified, honorary degree of “Doctor of Divinity.” At first the privilege of adding two capital “D’s” to his name, on his letter heads, his visiting cards, his church advertisements in the Saturday evening paper, and on the gold-lettered sign in front of his church, had been highly appraised. Those two “D’s” had added almost a furlong to his mental egoism. He felt himself admitted to the highest peak where dwelt the chosen theological giants. But finally, after much thinking—for Upwell was at heart an honorable man—conscience had asserted itself with a flaming manifestation that shrivelled up this mental egoism and left inside the poor man’s mind a mass of smoking, smouldering remorse which no amount of “Poohing” could quench. Conscience, in that sure way it has, and blunt, kept saying: “You are not worthy of the ‘D.D.’ In the first place, you are ill furnished with education.[62] You have never been under the discipline of a school. What you have is merely the results of desultory home reading. You have never accomplished anything worthy of a ‘D.D.’ honor. You are minister to a handful of farmers, in an isolated community, in a church which pays a salary of five hundred and fifty dollars a year—when it does. You have never made more than four speeches in Conference, and they were in debate—remarks from the floor, in which the Chairman found you ‘out-of-order’ twice! You have played no heroic part in social reform or made any spiritual stir. The degree was purchased because you were selfishly ambitious. It was sold to you in cold blood by a college that funded itself, partly, by such sales. Suppose that Peter, when you came to the gates of Heaven, should ask you, ‘Upwell, give me name, dignities, and titles!’ what would you reply? ‘Chadworth Upwell, Doctor of Divinity!’ with a host of angels to laugh at you? Not so. You would feel cheap, miserable!”

Thus stung more and more into remorse, the little Scotchman had finally been driven out to seek a place where, at least, he could be worthy of his ill-gotten honorary degree. He had come to Evangelical University to fill the mind with theology, ethics, history, and literature, so that at the end of a year or two there might be some degree of merit and fitness when he[63] placed “D.D.” after his name! Of course, Upwell did not put it in that bald way, but from the persistency with which he rolled the “D.D.” under his tongue, while criticizing the possession of it, it was not difficult to know that he would never bury it.

In Pungo Hall I came face to face with young men to whom the gates of educational privilege had been closed until they, like myself, were on the threshold of young manhood. They had come from the hearts of coal mines and breakers, bringing their life’s dreams with them, and an indomitable purpose. Every penny they spent for books and board had been earned by the sweat of their brow. They had come, many of them, from far-away farms and from the Southern mountain fastnesses where life’s expressions of hope and desire were to be seen in crude form; where they found that it took the “breath of an ideal to blow the dust off the actual.” Hands I shook, in fellowship, that were scarred from hard toil, calloused through contact with the tools of labor.

The comprehensiveness of the curriculum of Evangelical University was shown in the case of the Borden family. I became intimately acquainted with the head of the family, Julius Borden, while cutting sugar-cane on the University farm. Julius was a pale edition of Falstaff: fat, self-sufficient, self-important, with a scraggly yellowish moustache half screening[64] his pouting lips, and with a triple chin constantly slipping like a worm back and forth over the folds of the points of his collar. Mr. Borden, even at forty-two, after the discipline of business, married life, and children, took himself too seriously. He spoke with hesitating precision, though not with grammatical fluency, as if he had predetermined that no word should ever come from the depths of his profundity that did not aptly fit into the seriousness of life. The merest word I flung at him became a challenge that could be answered only when the hoe had been put down, the moustache pulled, the brows contracted in thought, and the throat cleared. When I greeted him with a trivial, “How do!” he could not trust himself to reply with audible words; he wanted me to take his acquiescence for granted—I could see it by the surprised look in his eyes. As he had been a success at the grave-stone business, had been married the longest of any of the married students, and possessed the most children, he seemed to realize that these were tokens of superior power when compared to our bachelor, or the other married students’ bridal, limitations. He fairly withered our proffered suggestions or theories or criticisms, with his weighty authoritative, “I’ve seen so much, you see!” It was, in his own estimation, equal to a hurricane from the Talmud blowing on the chaff of the Apocrypha. By reason of this constantly[65] paraded wisdom, Julius soon became current on the campus as “Pa” Borden.

He had given up his grave-stone business; had brought his money, his wife, and two children to the University for a “family fitting” as he termed it; much as a farmer goes to the general store with his family to be clothed, shoed, and candied. The wife, at her marriage, had just graduated from a high school, so that she entered the collegiate department of the University, on her way towards an A.B. to be earned outside of the chicken-raising in which she indulged. Jack, a quick-witted lad of twelve, found a place in the elementary classes, by the side of Estes, two Porto Ricans, a Japanese, a missionary’s little girl, and several other students who had to commence at the bottom of the educational scale. Edith, a romantic-eyed daughter, who wore Scotch-plaid dresses and Sis Hopkins’ braids, was plunging through the College Preparatory division close on the heels of her mother. The father, least of the family in school discipline, had to humble himself so low as to take his place with a backward grass widower in a “B” section of the grammar class because of his tendency to forget, after a day, the relations and distinctions between verbs and nouns and the various other members of the grammar family. But Julius saw to it that besides the baneful necessity of his humble place in the grammar class he came to a proper[66] level in those studies in which he could express his preference. He revelled in the Bible class, the Historical and the Oratorical classes to his heart’s content, but though he shone creditably in them, he never could quite clear himself from the “B” section of the grammar class; grammar being his thorn in the flesh, as he testified in one evening’s prayer-meeting, when the Apostle Paul and his historic affliction was the lesson. Even the backward grass widower, who had a thick mass of shining curls and intended becoming a temperance “orator” finally graduated from the “B” section, thereby heightening the shame of poor Julius, who seemed predestined to do poorly with the science of speech, and forever linger in the shadow of the “poor-doers.”

[67]

## Chapter VI. Financial Pessimism
Taken in Hand by Thropper and
Shown in its Real Light. A Turkish
Rug that Smoked. A Poet in
Search of Kerosene. Wonderful
Antics of an Ironing-Board. Economy
at a Tub. Three more Waiting
for it After Brock’s Bath. The
Chemical Reduction of a Cauldron
of Tomatoes into Something Sweet

MY capital of three dollars was very quickly expended. After I had spent the last quarter of a dollar for writing paper and pens, my pockets were as empty as they were the hour I bought my suit from the Jewish merchant. I stood penniless in the first week of my educational career: a realization[68] that brought out every atom of self-distrust, philosophical pessimism and gloomy foreboding. I had been completely dependent upon nickels and half dollars previously. I had not moved without they paved the way. Nothing of enjoyment and privilege had been secured without money. Theatres, games, parties, trips; these had always made their call on my spending money. Now I stood facing an academic career absolutely without a penny and with no possible hope that in the outside world there would ever be any benefactor to forward one. I was stranded. I thought of the students who relied upon monthly checks from home or from friends. I thought of the students who had their own bank accounts which would carry them through the school. I thought, with a kindling of envy, of the students who the previous summer had earned the following year’s expenses. I secured a minimum of comfort from such reflections. They plunged me deeper and deeper into the gulping pit that sucks enthusiasm out of life.

Thropper found me, standing by the window, indulging in such a dispiriting review of my prospects. In his bustling way he shouted:

“Well, Priddy, what’s the row now, eh?”

“I shouldn’t be—here,” I choked.

“Well,” he exclaimed, “I thought you’d get ’em—soon.”

“What do you mean, Thropper?”

[69]“Homesick blues, that’s all. You’ve got every symptom showing, Priddy. They’re on you, all right.”

“I’m not homesick, Thropper,” I blurted out. “I have no reason to be homesick. It’s not that at all. I’m fretting about money: that’s all.”

“The root of all evil,” he mocked.

“Wrong there, Thropper.” I half smiled, cheered beyond measure by his banter. “I heard a preacher say that the Bible said, ‘The love of money is the root of evil.’”

“Well,” bluffed Thropper, “what’s the difference? Wherever you find money you find the love of it. They are synonymous.”

“I’m in no danger from either, about this time, Thropper. I haven’t a cent to my name, and as I search the future I don’t see a prospect of any except I give up the University.”

“That needn’t worry you, Priddy!”

I looked at my roommate in amazement. He was not smiling. In fact, he was looking very seriously at me.

“Not worry me?” I gasped. “That’s comforting, to be sure!”

“What have you got to worry about?” he asked.

“What—worry about?” I stammered, not falling in with his mood.

“Yes. Tell me!”

“In the first place,” I explained, “you know that I had but three dollars—three—t-h-r-e-e,[70] three, d-o-l-l-a-r-s, dollars; three dollars—to begin my education with.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I told you that I shall never expect any help from the outside; that if I stay here I shall have to rely entirely on what I can earn with my own hands.”

“I see.”

“Well!”

“Well?”

“Well!”

“Well?”

“Isn’t it clear, Thropper?”

“Isn’t what clear?”

“The predicament I’m in.”

“Predicament?”

“Of course!” I retorted, impatiently. “What else is it for a fellow to be stranded as I am? You surely wouldn’t call it a blessing, would you?”

“I might!”

“What!”

Then Thropper, without another word, deliberately turned inside out each pocket that he owned and deposited in my hands the following items: A well-worn ink and pencil eraser, a fountain pen, a stub of a Dixon’s indelible pencil, some blurred pencil notes, a half-dozen toothpicks, a crumpled letter, a bunch of keys, a bachelor button, two handkerchiefs, and fifteen cents in two nickels and five coppers.

[71]“There,” he sighed. “That’s all. There’s not a penny in my trunk. The money represents my worldly fortunes—until I go out and earn more. I, too, have to rely upon my own efforts. Shake, Priddy!”

The big-hearted fellow reached for my empty hand and gave it a vigorous shaking.

“You’re not bad off!” he declared. “Let me tell you why. You see,” he went on to explain, “after you’ve got in the swing of things here, you become somewhat of a social or economic philosopher. You’re rich, Priddy!” He smiled benevolently on me.

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“That accounts for it, probably.”

“Accounts for what?”

“Your high and exalted estimate put on money necessary to get you through college. I understand that across the water it is only the rich and the noble who are welcomed to the colleges; that the mass of workers have come to respect education accordingly. At least, that is the idea one gets through the books and magazine articles which have to do with English college life. Whether it is true or not is another matter. Anyway, Priddy, you’ve got to understand that things are different in America. Our colleges are democratic and extremely practical. Now take yourself, for instance; you[72] have come out here regarding it impossible for you to move hand or foot towards your education without money in your pocket. Things are so arranged that you don’t need to give yourself much trouble on that account. You say you’ve got no money and that you ought to get away from here, on that account. That’s the way thousands of plow boys and machine tenders are arguing, only they say, ‘We haven’t any money; therefore we’ve no chance to get to college.’”

“I know that’s so,” I interrupted.

“You see this arm,” and Thropper made a sledge-hammer of his right arm, bringing his clenched fist down on his table. “That represents my endowment of good health and strength. How much is that worth, in terms of dollars earned in a year during spare time, Priddy?”

“Why—I—”

“Sixty-five dollars during school terms last year, outside of vacations: sixty-five dollars earned at odd jobs during Saturdays and odd hours,” he said. “All the spare cash I was called upon to spend. Of course in the summer, by canvassing stereoscopic views, I cleared sixty-seven more, above my expenses. That’s what the arm stands for. Its strength is convertible into cash almost any day that I care to go out and earn it—keeping on with my studies, too, of course.”

[73]“But I’m earning my board by waiting on table,” I urged; “that does not touch my tuition and room rent, Thropper.”

“Which amounts to about thirty dollars outside of board,” he laughed. “You aren’t worth much if you can’t earn that in a year and keep on with your studies, Priddy. I think you’re lucky, that’s what I think, in earning your board so easily. That’s the big item!”

“But what can I find to do? I can’t leave the campus. I have to be around for the meal hours.”

Thropper went over to his desk and secured a brown-backed account book, and read off the following list:

“Stacking books in the library, twelve cents an hour. Wheeling Professor Dix’s invalid aunt in wheel chair, twelve cents an hour and dinner. Scrubbing floors in University Hall, twelve cents an hour. Weeding garden, cutting sugar-cane, thawing frozen gas pipes, grading lawn, kneading bread, cleaning black-boards, ringing bell, watchman, running washing-machines, errands, pruning trees, dusting Professor Harvey’s insects; all twelve cents an hour, Priddy. The list of my chores for last year. Possibilities for you, my boy!”

“Oh, I see!”

“Feel better, now?”

I smiled and then said, feelingly, to my roommate:

[74]“Thropper, you’d be worth ten dollars an hour in a hospital bracing up discouraged financiers; that you would!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, pleased with what I said. “I’ve been up against it myself, Priddy. I understand, that’s all.”

“Have been up against it?” I gasped. “Thropper, I guess you should put it in the present tense: are up against it. Here is your fifteen cents, your present fortune. What are you going to do about money?”

“Oh, me?” He felt under his table and brought out to view a tin lunch box made to resemble a bundle of school books. “I’ll have that filled on Saturday morning at six o’clock, put on these—” he rumbled behind his clothes-screen and threw a pair of dirty overalls on the floor and a soft, black shirt—“and go to my regular Saturday job in the glass factory. A dollar and fifty for the day; regular as the week comes around. That’s the way I take care of myself, Priddy!”

“But when I work for the University I don’t get cash, do I, Thropper?”

“No,” he said, “it goes on your bill. But you won’t find it hard to get along without money here,” he said, “there isn’t much that you can buy, outside of clothes and a lecture in the village once in a while. You’ll soon become accustomed to getting along without cash, all right.”

When Saturday morning arrived, it was a[75] distinct surprise to hear Thropper moving in the room first, for he usually had droned while I prepared for the day’s work. I opened my eyes. The alarm clock on the table told me that it was half-past five. I watched my roommate as he donned his working clothes and put on a slouch hat.

“An Englishman would call you a ‘navvy,’” I smiled.

“I should think an American would call me a tramp!” he replied. “But you ought to see some of the Bulgarians I have to work with!” He spread out his hands expressively to indicate that whatever the Bulgarians did look like, he had not the rhetoric available at that moment with which to describe them.

There came a knock on the door and in response to Thropper’s cheery “Come in!” there appeared another “tramp” with his lunch box; a tall, high-cheek-boned Southerner, named Tripp, who drawled,

“Best be gettin’ deown, Thropper!”

So with a good-bye, Thropper left the room, turning to tell me that if I found time, I might clean up the room—in his absence.

“Be sure and shake the Turkish rugs,” he laughed, pointing to the patches of well-worn carpet that were used for rugs. “When you shake them you’ll find them very Turkish; they smoke!”

By the time the early lunch for the workers[76] had ended, there were seven “tramps” who went to the glass factory with Thropper. Included among them were two students, whom, judged by their excellent dress and their social graces on the campus, I had thought were none other than the sons of wealthy parents.

When the Bible verses had been given at the tables and after the last slice of fried potato had been scraped out of the dish, the students hurried from the room and disposed themselves for work.

As I left the dining-hall, I saw young women with duster caps on their heads, leaning out of dormitory windows shaking rugs; others I found hurrying down to other dormitories with bundles of laundry. When I arrived in Pungo Hall, I was greeted with the thumping of brushes, the clatter of furniture, and the shouts of the men as they called to one another above the clouds of dust that were being hurled from the rooms into the hallway.

A knock came on my door as I started to sweep the room, and Jason, the poet, poking his long neck around the corner of the door-post, asked in the most concerned way imaginable,

“Brother Priddy, is the kerosene can here?”

“Why—no, I haven’t seen it. What do you do with kerosene? Don’t you burn gas?”

Jason blushed, and then replied,

“Oh—we—er—use the kerosene for beds!”

Jason, the Poet, Looked in

[77]“Beds?”

“To subdue those fiery creatures who domicile in beds!” he affirmed.

“Oh, bugs!” I blurted with such roughness that it must have made his sensitive and poetic nerves clang.

At eight o’clock a group of students, with clean collars and well-pressed clothes, came down from the University building, each carrying an ironing-board, to be sold in some nearby town. This ironing-board was entirely unlike every other ironing-board invented by man or woman. It was the product of the fertile and practical mind of our mathematical professor; its chief virtues being, as described in the prospectus, that “it stands up like a soldier, kneels down like a camel, and folds up like a jack-knife!” With all its novelty, it was extremely practical and, the agents reported, sold well. A large number of useful citizens are out in the serviceable centres of life, who, if they ever choose a coat of arms will have to adorn their shield with an ironing-board—“rampant,” for to it they owe much of the financial lubrication which smoothed their passage through the school.

Hurrying after the same train were three young women, each armed with a book, on their way to make fifty per cent from literary householders. At different hours of the morning other students went to the village where every sort of task from house-cleaning to raking up dead[78] gardens was undertaken. Evangelical University was at work.

The head waiter, Brock, came into the room as I was cleaning it and said:

“Priddy, has any one been in after the tub?”

“The tub?”

“Yes, and the rubbing board!”

“I didn’t know those things were here.”

“Your roommate and I have a whole laundry set on shares. Look in my room and you’ll see the irons; the flat-irons.”

“No, the tub and the board are not here,” I reported, after a search.

The tall German went into the hall, raised his voice in a great, resounding shout:

“The wash tub! Who has it?”

A door at the end of the hallway opened and a voice replied:

“Just rinsing out my shirt, Brock. Have it in a jiffy!”

A few minutes later Brock called to me from his room. When I presented myself before him, I discovered him with his sleeves rolled up, busily engaged in pouring hot water from a kettle over some shirts and handkerchiefs.

“Any white things of yours, handkerchiefs or shirts, Priddy,” he announced, “might just as well go in with mine.”

So we shared the wash that morning. After they had been rinsed, I carried them to the rear of the building and hung them on a double[79] wire line where the gas-laden air from the sheep pastures hummed through them and the sun burned them dry in an hour.

That same afternoon, after having expressed to Brock my desire for extra work in the hours when I was not on duty in the dining-hall, I found myself standing over an immense cauldron under which blazed a hot camp-fire. In the cauldron were bushels of tomatoes and many pounds of sugar. With a long ladle I stirred the concoction until nine o’clock that night, save for the interruption of supper, and by that time I had the satisfaction of seeing it turn from a vivid pink to a dark red until it turned into a tarty, pasty preserve, not unlike strawberry damson in appearance. That night there went on the University records, against my name, “To seven hours’ labor, at 12 cents, .84.” I had paid that much, that week, towards my tuition.

[80]

## Chapter VII. An Academic Ride
in Five Carriages at Once. A
Business Appeal Mixed in with
the Order of Creation. Is it Best
for a Man to Marry his First
Love. A Sleuth-Dean. A Queen’s
Birthday Supper with an Athletic
Conclusion. Jerry Birch Stands
up for Albion. How we Tamed
him

THE terror that at first had been imposed upon me by the sense of my own ignorance, a terror which had led me to think that at twenty years of age no ambitious youth could at all fit into the educational scheme, died down quite rapidly at Evangelical University.[81] The curriculum there was no arbitrary imposition, as it is so commonly in the Four-Hundred-Dollar-a-Year University, into which a student must fit himself willy-nilly, and to which he must either conform or not approach. The Evangelical University curriculum was made to bend to the needs of an illiterate man of forty and to the advanced demands of the graduate who sought his doctorate in Philosophy. Its principle was that of intellectual service to fit the needs of all who come whether poorly fitted, old or poor. Estes, “Pa” Borden, myself and many others, who certainly would not have had the chance for inspiration offered us in hundreds of dignified schools, especially on such terms, were given our lifetime’s chance in Evangelical University.

But it must have looked chaotic, intellectually riotous, to a dignified dean of a classic university, and, no doubt, he would have had much in criticism of the university to offer, from his proper angle, after looking on the manner in which the students mixed their courses.

In my first term I spread myself through the common school, the business, the college preparatory, the collegiate, and the theological divisions of the University! It was akin to taking an academic ride in five carriages at once! When the professor dismissed me from[82] the college class in logic I went immediately into the basement, where I joined the grammar class, and from the grammar class I went to the theological department and recited on Church History. From that class I went into the scientific department and was heard in zoölogy, and from zoölogy I found my way in the business department where I practised on the typewriter.

Though I came before this intellectual privilege with a hungry mind, yet, threaded throughout it all were the complaints of the professors in regard to the limitations under which they worked. The professor of science constantly unfolded to us, who met him in zoölogy, a pet dream of his which comprehended a future benefactor who should increase the number of specimens in the museum. The English professor was embarrassed frequently by the inadequacy of the library. In our Bible classes, the President would take us into his confidence, the day after a faculty meeting, and descant upon the hardship, the embarrassing, financial hardship, of meeting the expenses of the school. There was no lack of dignity to this proceeding, for each one of us felt under obligations to the University, knowing well enough that whatever financial sacrifices the faculty underwent, were sacrifices made in order that we might receive an education. So the President was within the bounds of propriety and discipline[83] when he concluded his report with his customary: “And so, young ladies and gentlemen, if you are acquainted with any business men or wealthy person who might be made generous by our worthy appeal, kindly hand me their names and addresses after class. Mr. Stanton, you will please describe the order of creation as given in the first book of Moses!”

But it was not long before I had to realize that I had put myself under an exacting discipline by coming to Evangelical University. We had a dean who in effectiveness and as a sleuth would have been the dean of deans had an international society of them existed. The presence of young men and women on the campus rendered the Dean’s duties doubly hard. The rules were rules of a Mede. His surveillance was that of a man who felt an austere obligation to over a hundred anxious parents. No one, except by special permission, could be out of his room after half-past seven in the evening, save on society nights or on Sundays. For the enforcement of this rule, the Dean depended upon the reports of student monitors, but mainly upon his own vigilance. Every dormitory was always in danger of a visit from the Dean, and as the students in the dormitories were prevailingly men and women considerably beyond their ’teens, there was no inconsiderable disobedience of this rule; it made us feel too much like little children who[84] are put to bed while the daylight lingers on the earth. I soon had a taste of the common experience. One evening three students met with Thropper and me to indulge in a heated and loud discussion on the question: “That it is best for a man to marry his first love!” We started it at half-past six and once on the line of our pros and cons all sense of time and existence went out of mind. We heard not the inrush of students as the last bell rang, nor heeded the brooding silence that had come over the campus. We lived only in our arguments on that “love” issue, and Thropper was in the midst of a very final story of first love coming out happily when tested by marriage, when three knocks were heard on our wall, given by the student in the next room: That was the signal that the Dean was stirring. Instantly the window was opened, our three visitors leaped out, and a few seconds later, when the Dean knocked on the door, Thropper met him innocently with the proposal, “Have a chair, sir?” and the Dean, glancing about merely said, with a pleasant smile, “I just thought I’d look in, that’s all.” When he left, we knew that when he went to the rooms of our three friends, upstairs, he would find them in their shirtsleeves poring over their books. I often saw him in the twilight or under the glow of lighted windows, this Dean performing his duty which, to a man of his fine, academic temper, must have[85] been so incompatible: a tall, ungeared, gaunt-faced, tight-lipped man, stooped and stealthy, searching the campus with his glinting eyes, squaring his jaws as he approached windows where law-breakers were gathered, post-haste after delinquents!

I chanced to be one among a half-dozen stout English hearts; at least they were English hearts when somebody proposed that it might be a patriotic act for us to celebrate, in a fitting, English manner, the birthday of Queen Victoria. On account of the un-American aspect of the proposed celebration it was deemed injudicious to ask the consent of the Dean, for we felt sure he would prohibit it. We were determined, however, to conduct a celebration that would be quiet, dignified, and memorable, without having in it any semblance of disorder. We also resolved to hold it on a Saturday evening, when the rules were not so strictly upheld. To this end, then, we persuaded the master of the dining-hall, who was also chef and baker, to fall into our scheme, though he was a loyal American. We engaged him to fry the steaks, and also gave him an English recipe for chipped potatoes.

On the night of the celebration we met in a student’s room in the ell of Pungo Hall, in the rear: a quiet, isolated room which also had the double virtue of being a wash-room with a stove in it! Over this the chef worked, quietly.[86] We blanketed the windows so that no one could peep on the scene. The table was spread and the seats occupied. Before us, on a white platter and in white dishes, were the steaks and the chips, surrounded by coffee, cake, and candy. After the meal, the chairman proposed speeches which had for their theme the greatness, the majesty, and the high repute of the “glorious Queen.” At the conclusion of these speeches, we tried to sing a reminiscent snatch of “Rule Britannia,” but had, finally, to compromise on “God Save the Queen.” The college bell had struck eleven when one of the party proposed that it might waken us up if we went out on the campus and exercised ourselves by holding a jumping contest. On account of the lavishness of the feast and the heartiness with which we had partaken, we were ready to fall in with this proposal.

In front of a little cottage in which a few students had double rooms, we leaped and jumped very quietly for some minutes, speaking in whispers, for it was nearly midnight, on the verge of the Sabbath. But suddenly we were startled by a loud voice calling from one of the windows, “I have your names!” The heartless monitor had spied on us. We were undone. Heartlessly, guiltily, we went back to our rooms. The damage had been done. We had been caught breaking the dread laws of the University. Nothing could keep us from the wrath of the Dean.

[87]We indulged in our prayers and our Bible study and our church attendance the following day with little enthusiasm, for when we chanced to meet one another we asked the same question, over and over, “What will he say?” For we had our heart in it. We were not flagrant despisers of order. We cared for the respect of our Dean.

On Monday morning we assembled in chapel for the usual morning service. The Dean led the service. We were expecting that during the notices he would say, reading from his book, “I wish to see Mr. Priddy and Mr. this and Mr. that,” and so on through the list of Englishmen, “at the conclusion of chapel.” But not so. In place of the customary sermon of ten minutes, he delivered a very Patrick-Henryish philippic against certain unnamed students who had so far forgotten themselves as not only to be unpatriotic towards their adopted country, and had not only demeaned themselves by an unlawful “revelry,” but had even been indulging in sports at midnight, on the verge of the Sabbath, and thereby rendered themselves unfit to give God the highest, most efficient service on the holy day. The unexpectedness of it, the fierceness of it, the lurid interpretations put on our innocent feast, its coloring into a “night revel,” and the charge of impiety, unnerved me. I sat riveted to my chair, in a cold sweat. I felt as must a murderer in[88] his sober moments when he realizes to the full the enormity of his deed. The Dean concluded his philippic, during which he had not mentioned a name, by this oracular notice:

“I want each one of those revelers to meet me after chapel, in my office.”

All eyes were sympathetic towards the Englishmen as we gathered at the Dean’s door. In his sanctuary he further explained to us the extent of our crime, making it, to the mind of Jerry Birch, a stubby, vigorous-minded Briton, treason. Jerry flared forth in an attempt to prove to the Dean that he (the Dean) was an enemy to the Queen, and that an appeal might properly be made to the British ambassador, and—but here we cautioned Jerry to stop. We finally tamed him into quietness, and the Dean dismissed us with the warning to show ourselves peace-respecting Americans from then on.

[89]

## Chapter VIII. The Doctrinal
Temper of the University and
Thropper’s Talk about it. Introduces
the Select Board of the Pharisees.
Prayer-Meeting Monopoly
Combated by Independents. Jason
on my Track and How it Came out

EVANGELICAL UNIVERSITY was founded by a minister of intense religious convictions and its policy was directed by a Board composed of men characterized by religious zeal. The University stood committed, also, to the Christianization as well as to the education of its students. In its advertisements, special emphasis was laid on “annual revivals,” “personal, religious work of students,” and other evidences of a flourishing religious atmosphere.

Now in this, Evangelical University stood in line with hundreds of efficient institutions, but it went a step farther, and not only made its[90] boast in regard to its Christian background, but it also gained repute as the exponent of a particular, very sectarian, very dogmatic, and intense doctrine; namely, that not until a particular emotional experience had been secured was a Christian a substantial and serviceable Christian. “The triple-birth doctrine,” as Thropper christened it, “being natural birth, spiritual birth, and extra-spiritual birth.”

There were several students in the University who were there merely for its intellectual privileges and who did not believe in this intense doctrine of “the triple-birth.”

Thropper said to me, one night, when we were discussing this matter:

“Priddy, I’ll guarantee that out of all the students here, you will not find more than five in all that do not profess to have a religious experience. Now that ought to satisfy the University, but it won’t. That isn’t enough. Until every one believes heart and soul in its doctrine of the ‘triple-birth,’ and gets emotionalized, the whole place will be turned upside down. Now I have always thought myself a religious fellow. I belong to the church. I am trying to live a Christian life. I have a Christian home in which I have always been trained piously and well. But they have given me no rest since I came here. They pray for me every year and struggle with me, and quibble about me, all in order to get me to go through the ‘triple-birth,’[91] which may be all right for them, but does not appeal to me. Yet, because I don’t go over to their way of thinking, they can’t regard me as a religious man. I’m not the only one, either. There are others whom they bother in the same way. If we were out and out heathen, they couldn’t be more alarmed over us. If we were unsocial atheists and immoral beings, their enthusiasm and concern would be worth while, but when some of us are to be preachers and respect everything that is true and helpful and yet have to be prayed for in public and hounded from pillar to post by them, why—”

“Who do you mean by ‘they’ and ‘them,’ Thropper?” I asked.

“Oh, certain of the students who are enthusiasts on the ‘triple-birth’ doctrine,” he replied. “They mean well enough, and are good folks, but I can’t agree with their peculiar doctrines and I tell them so, right out.”

“But a few students can’t carry off the whole situation, Thropper.”

“Can’t, eh? Well, you see, as this is the particular doctrine for which the University officially stands, the few aggressive students who preach the idea are really in the majority. There’s a little set of them, led by Jason, the Poet, who roam through the life of this University like a little group of heretic hunters in some medieval community, with all power and[92] authority back of them.” He sighed, deeply. “They make life miserable for many,” he said.

I laughed at him.

“Why, Thropper, don’t take it to heart so; just go along your own way, tolerantly, knowing that if some of us can’t actually agree, we can respect one another’s differences—if they’re not vicious.”

He regarded me as if I had lost my wit.

“That sounds nice, that does, Priddy, and it is good sense, too, but it’s wasted here, old boy. You and I and some others may find consolation in it, but Jason and his Board of Pharisees would have their tongues cut out and their right hands severed before they would rest easy with us differing from them, standing outside their particular doctrines. You don’t know Jason. Besides, wait till you have been here a year and then you will see so many things take place under the direction of the University that it will be impossible for you not to know that you are persona grata here only when you swing over to a full acceptance of the doctrine of the ‘triple-birth’: there’ll be the annual revival when a whole, intense week will be devoted to hardly anything else but a propaganda of that doctrine. There will come the weekly prayer-meetings, the talks from visiting exponents of the doctrine; oh, they won’t let you rest easy in your differences, Priddy.[93] Wait till Jason and his crowd get on your track!”

“You talk as if they were going to be the worst sort of meddlers, Thropper.”

“Didn’t you hear me call them the Board of the Pharisees? Did you think I didn’t mean that for a good description, Priddy? Well, what were Pharisees always doing? Meddling. Telling the people to be holy by washing the dinner plates thus and so; telling the people that God was found by wearing this and that. Well, that’s what Jason and his crowd are busy doing about here, through the year. The sight of a gold ring on my finger fairly dilated the nostrils of one of them; he set about praying for me and urging me day after day to stop wearing it because it was the symbol of ‘carnal pride,’ and he quoted ever so much Scripture, too.”

After that I noted with especial interest the monopoly exercised by Jason and a small number of the students—male and female—over the multitude of religious meetings that embroidered the week of study. The two noon prayer-meetings, the after-supper services, the Thursday evening university service, the many missionary meetings, the Bible study classes, the Sunday morning “search” services: in all these the tone was given by the fervid and dogmatic Jason and his followers. Wherever a religious interest of any sort chanced to be[94] organized, one was certain to find on its list of officers some representative of Jason, the Poet. Thropper and I, and several others among the students, formed “independent” circles for prayer and Bible study, where we could, for once a week, at least, have our own, special beliefs prevail.

One November morning, as I was leaving the dining-hall, Jason met me at the door.

“I should like to have a word with you, Brother Priddy,” he announced.

“Certainly,” I replied.

“I have been considerably burdened for you, lately, Brother Priddy.”

“Eh?”

“You have been the subject of my prayers.”

“How is that?”

“Because I think, though you may not realize it, that Satan is trying to lead you astray,” he answered, solemnly.

“That’s interesting, I’m sure.”

“It’s terrible!” he half shuddered.

“But—er—what especial act of mine, Jason, has brought out this—er—burden for me?”

“Carnal pride!” he exclaimed.

“Pride?” I gasped. “I didn’t think I had anything or had done anything to be proud over—that I know of.”

“I thought you did not see it,” he announced; “that is the deceitfulness of sin, it blinds us.[95] That is why I came to you—to warn, you understand.”

“Then you will relieve the tension I am suffering from at this minute,” I retorted, “by telling me just what it is to which I am blind, and which is sinful. I am sure I stand ready to renounce anything that is liable to stand between me and God, Jason.”

His severe, but intensely spiritualized features relaxed at that declaration. He nodded his head and rubbed his pale hands.

“I am glad that you are open to the truth, Brother Priddy,” he crooned, with satisfaction. “I have especial reference to that watch-chain of yours and to that scarf-pin.”

“What!”

“That and that,” he reiterated, pointing first to my watch-chain and then to my scarf-pin.

“Nonsense,” I exclaimed. “What in the world are you making this bother over?”

“That watch-chain and the pin are ornaments and personal adornments, not necessary to the person. They are expressions of pride which lies in the heart to corrupt it. Therefore you will never find peace with God until you have discarded them.”

“Those things expressions of pride?” I gasped, “why, that chain is gold-plated and didn’t cost more than a dollar and a half, and as for the tie-pin!” I laughed. “Well, I paid ten cents for it, opals and all, in a Five and Ten[96] Cent Store, Jason. Not much to grow proud over.”

“It is not the price, Brother Priddy, but the principle.”

“But I swear to you, Jason, that I don’t give those things a thought.”

“No, granting that they don’t hurt you,” went on Jason, persistently, “they are liable to lead others into pride. It is the weak brother you must think of.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger of others finding much to emulate in my jewelry or dress,” I answered. “I do recognize the force of what you have to say about the weak brother, Jason, and if, for a minute, I imagined I was doing anything or wearing anything that would hurt the life of another in any appreciable degree, why I’d renounce it quickly enough, you can wager!”

“I never indulge in wagers,” protested the literalist, “it is ungodly. I still persist in asking you to give up that jewelry on the ground that in all things we should walk soberly, as the Bible enjoins.”

“Well, I’ll think it over, Jason,” I said, walking hurriedly away.

When Thropper returned from his trigonometry, I recounted my experience with Jason.

“Well, your days of quietness are gone now, Priddy,” he declared. “You’ve got a Pharisee on your trail who will keep it until your days are made miserable.”

[97]“But why doesn’t he cut off his beautiful curls and be consistent?” I protested. “Why doesn’t he throw off that peculiar vest and that military coat? He’d be consistent if he did! Talk about offending the weak brother! If a dude wouldn’t be jealous of those finely cultivated curls, I don’t know a dude. I’ll wager Jason is always looking in the glass, at himself!”

“Oh,” smiled my roommate, “you just tell him about his coat and his curls and he’ll have his explanation ready. Those curls are sent by the Lord. As for his coat and vest; they are simple, without the fancy incidents common to our coats! Don’t try to beat him in a quibble, Priddy. He’s got you before you start. Can you quote over half the Bible word for word without once looking at it?”

“No-o!”

“Jason can! Are you able to read it in Hebrew and in Greek?”

“No-o-o!”

“Jason is! He’s got you when it comes to Biblical quotation and can fit a passage even to so common an act as eating a dish of creamed toast!”

“But I shan’t give in to him—that is, unless I really see the force of his arguments, Thropper.”

“Oh,” smiled Thropper, “he’ll give you forceful arguments enough, that’s the hang of the[98] fellow. He knows so much! I tell you, Priddy, when you employ logic, biblical lore, and a fanatical sincerity in trying to persuade an innocent little greenhorn like you—to give up a watch-chain and a tie-pin, why, the greenhorn is bound to go under!”

“We’ll see!” I declared, as the conclusion of the subject.

The next day, Jason found me in a corner of the library busy with my Latin. Without a word he edged over to me, pulled a little black book from his pocket, opened it at a marked place, fixed it on the chair handle before me, indicated the marked passage with one of his long, white fingers and left me to myself. I put aside my Latin and investigated.

The book was the writing of John Wesley, and the place marked was a passage in a sermon on “The Wearing of Ornaments” or some such theme. In any case, that was the subject treated in the marked passage. It was a reiteration of the arguments Jason had advanced, but coming from so noted and often quoted an authority as the founder of the Methodists, it considerably sobered my impressionable senses. I had no sooner closed the book, than out of the unseen the Poet flitted to my side, and with a whispered, “Forceful, isn’t it?” Jason took up the book and returned to his study.

A day or two later he brought into the dining-hall a little green bound book, printed on cheap[99] paper and entitled, “The Victory of Selina Bostwick—Evangelist.” As he handed it to me, Jason said,

“Sister Bostwick is well known to me. I have sung for her in tent meetings, near Chicago. She is a saint of God. I want you to read the place I have marked, if you cannot find time to go through the whole book.”

In the privacy of my room, when Thropper chanced not to be around—for I did not want him to see me reading Jason’s book—I read the extract. It recounted, in a very rambling manner, the “third-birth” of Miss Bostwick—who, by the way, had been so inconsiderable a person as a seamstress who exhorted in revival services. The tale went on to show how, as a young girl, Selina had been especially addicted to wearing gaudy jewelry: stone-tipped hat-pins, glass ornamented combs, two rings, one with a cluster of imitation rubies, the other a plain band, which had been her mother’s wedding-ring, and various brooches and fancy studs. These, it seemed, had entirely prevented Selina from entering into the deeper faith in God, and for proof argued that so long as she fastened her heart on those trinkets she had never once been able to preach or exhort in meeting or revival. Then the day came when she plucked them from her and threw them in her trunk. From that day on, she had gone into the world preaching and exhorting successfully!

[100]When I returned the book to Jason, he entered into a long discussion with me, and by the subconscious seriousness he had created in my heart over the question of ornaments and the kingdom, and because I was getting weary of the theme, and also because the tie-pin and the watch-chain were becoming eyesores to me, I finally said,

“Oh, I’ll stop wearing them, I guess!”

Jason rubbed his white hands and patted me on the shoulders.

“There is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth,” he quoted.

“I’m not a sin—Oh, don’t let us get into any more arguments over the matter,” I corrected, eager to be out of the reach of my persecutor. “Here they are; both of them to be put in a drawer—or something.”

I pulled out the tie-pin and unfastened the watch-chain. Then I was perplexed.

“But, Jason,” I remonstrated, “I have to carry this watch, you know. The watch-chain was handy. It kept me from losing the watch. What am I to do, if I don’t have this chain? It seems to me that I had best keep wearing it. What do you do for your watch?”

As he pulled out a gold Waltham I felt like asking him if it would not be more consistent for him to wear a nickel-plated one, but remembering Thropper’s comments, I expected Jason would argue that it was more economical to[101] buy a gold watch on account of its wearing qualities and reliability, so I kept the protest to myself. Jason’s watch was attached to a woven black chain, which, he said, he had made from a long shoe-lace!

“I’ll make one for you, too,” he added generously, “if you’ll get a long lace.”

The next day I gave him the lace, and after dinner, we sat in the reception room, where in ten minutes, he wove for my watch a chain as artistic as a shoe-string chain may be. After he had fastened it in my button-hole and to my watch, he said:

“Well, Brother Priddy, the weak brother will not have cause to stumble now, will he?”

[102]

## Chapter IX. My Trip into the
Magic World of the Past. How
Appreciation is sometimes Worth
More than Money. Jason and
his Coterie on Scent of Terrible
Heresies. How God Takes Care
of His Orators. How a Big Soul
can go through Annoyances

THE strangeness of my life had worn off by winter. I knew every man and woman by name and character, and they knew me. The daily routine of class work and waiting on table more and more took the novelty from my existence. I was getting the maximum of inspiration from my studies. Leaning back in my chair, under the hissing, flaring gas flame, with drowsy Thropper opposite me in his sheepskin upholstered chair, I went forth into the new worlds where Cæsar led his mailed Romans[103] and his following of slave kings, where the gaudy coronations and noisy wars of ancient England were enacted; into the world whereon Christ scattered the seed of faith out of which grew, stone by stone, dipped in martyrs’ blood, the magnificent cathedral Universal Church. With the guidance of the professors, I pierced into the living, animal world where tooth and fang and claw were in contest and where the divine finger was busy sorting moral law out of it. I was being daily disciplined in the use of language and in the finer esthetic appreciations of it, under the direction of the English teachers and the Oratorical Professor.

There were many, who with me, went in confidence to our teachers and gave them our thanks for their sacrificial services. Of all the service that I have seen men and women render, that done by the faculty of Evangelical University measured up to the finest. They were men and women of liberal culture; trained, many of them, in our most prominent institutions. Every day that they lingered at the University teaching us was a sacrifice. They were sadly underpaid. There was no endowment from which to guarantee them their salaries. Some of them worked with us, out of sheer enthusiasm, claiming that their wages were the gold of our thanks and outspoken appreciations. They were willing to economize and live in poorly furnished homes, in order to awaken in those of us who had had[104] little opportunity, the first spark of intellectual response.

One of our teachers took me aside, in the privacy of his empty classroom, for the purpose of assisting me with a back lesson. I had occasion to remark,

“Professor, you aren’t giving yourself a fair chance, here, are you? Some of the students have been saying that you have had more than one opportunity to better yourself.”

The kindly eyes of the man glistened with tears, for he was very readily responsive to his feelings, and he said,

“Albert, I cannot better myself. There is no higher privilege in this world than to invest what God has seen fit to give us in the way of privilege or attainment in other lives that thirst for what we have! There are men in colleges, whom I know, surrounded by their books in pleasant college communities, fitted to a delightful social and intellectual life, teaching in classrooms filled with students who do not have to fight for a living as do the students here, yet they are not happy men; not one-tenth so happy as I am teaching you boys and girls! No, sir! All that those positions that have been offered me could have done would have been to ease me from financial worries, and relieve me from a few hours of instruction; but there is nothing in this wide world, Albert, can equal the work I am privileged to do with such as you, to[105] inspire you for useful service. It is missionary work; but missionary work pays the highest wages. I have the first chance at men in the making!”

It was not alone the poverty of the university equipment and the inadequate compensation they received which intensified the nobleness of our teachers’ characters, but also their endurance of some of the petty, trivial annoyances they suffered from the dogmatic Jason and his few followers. For even into the classrooms religious, doctrinal quibbles were carried by those stern and unyielding students. The little coterie went on strike in the English department when the Professor refused to debar Shakespere and Burns from the reading courses, in response to the charges drawn up and presented by Jason’s clique that those writers had unreadable passages in their works. Some one replied, that on this basis, Jason had better stop reading the Bible for the same reasons. To this Jason replied that “The Bible is the Bible, but Shakespere is only Shakespere!” But the more acute issues between Jason and his followers and the curriculum were to be found in the scientific and theological classrooms. Here the conflict between “science and religion” as the Church History termed it, became pointed, tragical. I can still see them, the two followers of Jason, standing before the scientific professor after class had been dismissed. They are on[106] scent of a terrible heresy! Aggressively they quiz the able exponent of science, as follows:

“You said in this recitation, professor, that the world was created in millions of years?”

“I did!”

“But the Bible says plainly, that God created it in six days and that He rested from his labors on the seventh day!”

“Oh, the Bible, in that part is not to be taken literally—it—”

But he could get no further. Two shocked faces were before him, and one of the students interjected,

“Why, we have to believe the Bible!”

“We shall stick to the Bible!” added the other in support.

“But let me explain,” began the professor, patiently, “you see the early Hebrews possessed no real science—”

“But, professor,” interrupted one of the students, “God revealed it to them and—”

“We will not discuss the matter further at this time,” interrupted the teacher.

“But what shall we do when the examination comes around,” asked the first speaker, “if you tell us to give the age of the earth, we shall either have to say that it is millions of years old or that it was made in six days?”

“Of course,” added the second student, with finality, “we shall have to stick to the Bible statement, even if you mark us down!”

[107]“Rest easy in your minds, young men,” retorted the severely tried professor, “I don’t think I shall call on you to undergo such a martyrdom!”

Even the professor of elocution was not exempt from this little band of literalists. Some of this band had so firm a confidence in God that they “could leave with Him” what they were to speak, how they were to speak it, and the sort of gestures that should accompany their exhortations, for they were preparing themselves for the church. “Pa” Borden was the leader in this sort of thought. He had done some exhorting before becoming a member of the University, and he summed up the case quite well when he said, in his heavy, sober way,

“What right has any man, I don’t care who he is, to improve on what God has done, I’d like to know? It will be given us in that day, says the Bible, what we shall say and how we shall say it. What more do you want?”

So this little band of the sons of the prophets stood apart from the kindly and helpful criticisms of the professor of elocution, and continued their old practise of yanking their stiff arms, standing on their awkward feet, speaking from tight throats, in stubborn loyalty to their faith in God’s oratorical interest in them.

The patience, the Christian patience, of the professors carried them past such trivial, but[108] real annoyances with the same nobleness with which a true-compassed ship goes straight to its port despite the little chips that tap against it. For every one of these quibblers over doctrine, there were several appreciative, awakening minds, leaping at the truth. The professors centered their real efforts on the majority of those who could face the truth no matter in how startling a dress it first presented itself. In such, these deep-hearted, sacrificing teachers found their real reward: lasting gratitude.

[109]

## Chapter X. The Magnitude of
a Postage Stamp. Showing how
Desperate the Thirst of Money
made me. Brock’s Rosy Nose
and its Possibilities as a Fireplace.
How Brock thought he was Fooling
me and the Other Way About.
The Barrow that Became our
Enemy and how Brock was Revenged
on it

IT was a morning in early December. An unsealed letter lay on my table, a Christmas greeting to a mill friend. I had written it the previous night. When the morning dawned, I realized that I had not enough money with which to purchase a stamp for it. A feeling of utter miserableness took hold of me. There I stood, working my way through school successfully, from week to week without any difficulty, and yet when it came to[110] forwarding a message of greeting to the outside world I was a pauper! That strong term mastered me. I knew that for the mere asking Thropper had a stamp waiting for me, but I resented the thought of charity, the humiliation of asking for the gift of a postage stamp. After chapel I went into the President’s office and on being shown in, made the following announcement.

“Please, Doctor, I think I had better leave the University. It is no use!”

“What is the matter now, young man?” he enquired, gently.

“I’ve got to earn some cash, sir. You know that I shall never have any by working for the University; it all goes on my account. I need some clothes, and just at present I need a stamp. I haven’t handled any money since my three dollars was spent; it is almost three months since then.”

“But you don’t have to run away from your education, do you?” asked the President, bending on me his searching eyes. “I thought you would stick to it!”

“But what can I do, sir?” I demanded, “I am busy waiting on the table, and cannot leave the campus to earn money. I give all my spare time to the University. If I could work a week or two at outside tasks I might get some money on hand.”

“There need be no trouble about that,”[111] agreed the President. “Get some one to take your place in the dining-hall on Saturdays, and I will see if there are any jobs you can do.”

The following morning, in chapel, the Dean read off my name as one of the students that the President wished to see, in his office.

“There is a load of bricks on a siding of the brick-mill—you know where that is, of course,” he said. “Brock has taken the contract for loading a car at something or other a thousand—which means about twenty cents an hour, I believe. He is quite willing to take you with him on Saturday, if you care for the work.”

Inwardly I thought of my frail muscles hurling rows of brick through the air on a winter’s day—and felt doubtful about the adventure, but the President was waiting for his answer, so I said hastily,

“Anything at all, sir, that will bring me in a real, substantial piece of money. It will look big enough when I do see it, sir!”

Thropper was eager to take a day off from the glass factory and so was able to take my place at the tables. I had a conference with Brock, relative to the proposed loading of the car of bricks.

“Can you manage it?” he asked dubiously, scanning his eyes doubtfully over my frail physique.

I was in a desperate mood just then, and with an accent in my voice that scorned even the suggestion[112] of any mental, physical, or moral incapacity, I declared,

“Can I?”

Then scanning Brock’s ungeared physique, I asked in turn,

“How about yourself? Seems to me you are a near rival to a centre-pole yourself, Brock!”

He grinned, guiltily.

“I used to exercise with dumb-bells—once upon a time. It is long since. I am afraid that the daily exercise of pressing the button of the call bell hasn’t done well by my muscles.”

“I’ve watched the Portuguese load schooners with bricks many a time,” I affirmed.

“Your experience might help—some,” he declared, “the man who engaged me told me how to place them in the car and all about the number of rows and the count. I’ll be able to manage that part of it. I hope that you and I, Priddy, will be able to succeed with the brick end of it.”

“The way the brick loaders do,” I explained, “is to pass them from hand to hand four or five bricks at a time—just like passing ball, you know!”

“Um, um!” nodded Brock. “But what about the sharp ends of the bricks? They cut gashes in soft hands, of course.”

“Oh, we’ll wear thick gloves,” I explained, “something to protect the hands.”

[113]“We should have to wear gloves under any circumstances,” said Brock, “the weather we’re getting is very far from a summer day!”

“Oh, we’ll manage all right,” I affirmed, for the mere thought of a possible dollar and a half in cash set my brain in a whirl of incaution and illogical optimism. In that mood, if the President had offered me his place for a week—for a cash wage—it is doubtful if I should have refused him.

By half-past seven the following Saturday morning, Brock and I, bundled in the oldest garments we had been able to borrow or beg, with quadruple thicknesses of old socks covering our hands, for mittens, and with lunches put up in pasteboard boxes, left the village center, walked down a frozen turnpike, until we came to the lonesome, neglected brickyard with its Egyptian tombs of piled brick, yet unsold. A covered freight car had been left on the rusty siding; the car stood off from the nearest brick-pile separated by a gap of two yards. It was a dreary and very cold prospect, for the north wind surged down over the frozen pastures, and hummed and wailed through the black latticework of an abandoned oil-well on the opposite side of the track.

“Your face is blue to begin with,” mumbled my companion from behind the folds of his cap.

“And your nose would make an excellent[114] danger signal on the rear end of a train,” I retorted. “When my hands get cold, which they are rapidly doing, I’ll warm them over your nose!”

“Better get to work,” suggested Brock, “before we freeze to death in this miserable place. Worth twenty cents an hour for this work, eh?”

“Worth a dollar an hour, I think,” I replied.

We fixed some stout planks into a run-way between the top of a brick-pile and the freight car, after the door had been unbarred. We found a shallow and creaky barrow under a shed. After helping me fill it with the first load, Brock tried to wheel into the car what we had put in. He gained the edge of the plank, and the ill-balanced load dumped over on the ground.

“We put in too many, to begin with,” suggested Brock. “Next time we’ll reduce the load by half. I forgot they were so heavy. I was too ambitious.”

The next load went across the planks successfully, and after they had been dumped on the floor of the car, Brock said,

“I’ll pack these in the car the way the man told me, and then when the load is properly started, we can take turns with the barrow.”

At first it was exciting and warm work, but after the first warm glow had died down in the blood, my body began to stiffen with the exposure.[115] Then my muscles, ill-treated by excessive and continuous lifting of the loads, began to tighten and shoot with pain. But at first, I did not care to let Brock know, Brock, who was snugly shielded from the wind, with the easier and less straining task. But he must have noticed me gasp in with a load for he suddenly leaped to his feet and said,

“Your turn here, now, Priddy. Give me the barrow!”

I flung myself to the dusty floor of the car when he relieved me of the barrow and never lifted a hand until I heard him coming with his first load. Then I picked up a brick and fitted it in one of the rows, and tried to say cheerfully, when he entered,

“Is that placed right, Brock?”

“All right, Priddy,” he replied, and then went out whistling with the barrow.

With the change in the task, I recuperated somewhat, and worked on with the thought warming me, that every hour added twenty cents in cash to my credit. When the first twenty cents had been earned, I took heart and said to myself,

“Well, I shall be able to buy that stamp for the letter!”

Brock ceased whistling after his fourth load. I took a look at his face. It was pale and strained.

“Hadn’t you better take a breathing spell,[116] Brock?” I suggested. “It comes hard when one isn’t used to it. That barrow wheels hard, too. We ought to have brought some wheel grease.”

“I guess I will sit down a few seconds,” agreed Brock. “It’s quite a lift—at first, but I think we’ll manage the job, don’t you?”

“We’ll try!” I commented, grimly.

So we passed the barrow from hand to hand, the loads growing smaller and smaller as the noon hour approached, and the need of rest and change becoming more and more imperative. When half-past eleven arrived I proposed that we eat our lunches; not so much for the mere satisfaction of hunger, but for the opportunity of absolute rest for an hour. Brock assented to the proposition the instant it had left my lips. In fact, he dropped his barrow in the middle of the plank; an act on which I commented by that fragment of an old song:

“For I’ve worked four hours this day, this day,
For I’ve worked four hours this day.
Keep your whiskers on, till the morning, John,
For I shan’t work another minute longer!”

We closed the doors of the car, sat in a far corner and munched our bread and cold meat as if it had been a luxury from a king’s banquet table. Then after our meal, in spite of the chilliness of the car, we stretched ourselves on our backs and gave our strained, worn muscles the opportunity of relaxation.

[117]“How do you feel?” Brock demanded after an interminable silence.

“Cold, tired, weary and sick!” I replied, throwing the mask off. “Let us either wheel that old barrow again or go back to the University.”

“Well,” muttered Brock, dispiritedly, “our backs can’t really get much worse, Priddy. We might as well finish a day’s work. If we leave now we’ll be unfit for work for another week anyway. We might as well get all we can out of it while we are about it.”

“Oh, that barrow! If it were a thing of flesh I’d stab it for my worst enemy!” I cried.

“We worked too steadily,” suggested Brock. “We were too ambitious. We’ll loaf along this afternoon and take more frequent rests. You pack the bricks for awhile. I’ll wheel!”

“Lucky you proposed to wheel first,” I muttered, “for I’d have gone on strike if I’d been the first.”

Brock looked knowingly at me, showed me the blisters on his hands and said,

“I know just how you feel!”

Numb, dispirited, weary and backsore, we worked until four o’clock in the afternoon. At that time, Brock was just coming across the bridge with a reduced load, staggering under it. I called out to him,

“I’ll not handle another brick!”

“Neither will I!” he replied, losing his grip[118] and the handles of the barrow so that it fell to the frozen ground with a resounding thud. “I’m done!”

When we reported at the office of the brickyard owner, and Brock had given the computations of the work we had done, my heart throbbed warmly for the first time since early morning when we were each handed a dollar and ten cents in real cash!

“This is the first money I have handled for three months!” I could not help exclaiming in the office.

“Do you mean it?” asked the contractor, interestedly.

“I do, sir!”

“Then any time between now and the end of the month that you want to earn a dollar or two come to this office and I’ll have some more bricks for you to load.”

I looked with a smile towards Brock. Brock returned my gaze with a hearty laugh. Then he said, holding out his swollen hands, for the man to view,

“No, thanks!”

And I, I said,

“Cash is good and I need it, but I think I’ll leave the handling of bricks to the Portuguese.”

[119]

## Chapter XI. How I Competed
with Patrick Henry and was made
Aware of an Uneconomical Waste
of the Eighth Letter of the Alphabet.
How I Condensed all my
Studies into an Oration. How the
Populace Greeted my Rehearsal.
Striking the Top Pitch

BY the middle of the year I had obtained such a grip on study that I was bold enough to incorporate two extra subjects in the week’s routine. Besides that, I conceived the idea of reading English history outside of class and then securing permission to pass an examination on it, a scheme in which the teacher acquiesced. I felt that I must make up for lost time and hungrily, voraciously threw myself at the privilege which fortune had brought me. I began to realize in my own mind what men called[120] “enthusiasm in his work.” Every day seemed to me a momentous day of opportunity: a day in which I might atone for the educational privilege I had missed up to my twentieth birthday. When I saw Aborn, stately, gifted, and on his way towards his Master’s degree at twenty, I was made to realize how long a road I had before me and how energetic I should have to be in order to get anywhere in education from my elementary and preparatory studies. So I put in my studies an investment of interest and patient attention which I had put in no other work that I had ever done.

The most outstanding interest that I had was the class in oratory. This class met on the top floor, under the rafters, in a room directly off from the chapel. It resembled the studio of a poor artist with its gray northern skylight and little windows high above the bare floor. The class included young men and women. Nearly all were preparing for religious work, as ministers, missionaries, and evangelists. One student, a shock-haired young Westerner with “temperament” and “personality,” who generally sat in the pose of an actor, was planning for the career of a public reader.

After the preliminary weeks of physical gymnastics and throat clearing, and after we were able to say “Oh!” without making the flame of a candle flicker, we began on the real excitement of speaking Orations; I began with the[121] traditional Patrick Henry, of course, and naturally, after long and patient rehearsals in my room credited myself with the fact that if the author of that thriller should chance to come into the oratorical studio on the morning when I planned to recite it before my professor, he would feel that his forceful utterance had passed into no mean mouth!

The morning on which I was scheduled to speak duly arrived and with it an increase in my confidence that I should do well with it: the confidence without which no orator yet—in school—ever did much. I stood out before the class, struck my pose—left foot at an angle from the right and slightly in front with the weight on the right foot to maintain balance—and attempted to recreate the atmosphere, the thrill, and the historic eloquence of the Virginia Convention where the oration had had its birth, before the innumerable army of school lads had passed it on from generation to generation. Applause greeted my effort and I sat down in a flush of happiness. However, the professor, after crediting me several points of excellence, brought up a criticism that plunged me into a sweat of guilty self-consciousness. He said,

“Mr. Priddy, why is it that you aspirate your words so? I know you were born in England, but you have been in this country for some time now. There were several places in the[122] oration where you placed ‘h’s’ where they should not have been placed, and where you left them off when they should have been retained!”

It was the first time in my whole life that anybody had called my attention to that fault. I said,

“Will you please give me samples, sir?”

“Well,” replied the professor, consulting his tablet, “you said ‘w’ile’ instead of ‘while,’ and ‘Hi’ instead of the pronoun ‘I.’ And ‘w’at’ instead of ‘what,’ and ‘Forbid it, Halmighty God,’ and you declaimed that passage, ‘Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?’ became ‘His life so dear hor peace so sweet has to be bought hat the price of chains and slavery?’”

I felt angry at myself, chagrined. There trooped into my guilt-smitten consciousness the innumerable times I must have put ‘h’s’ where they had not belonged and left them off where they should have been retained.

“Nobody ever told me—about it before, sir!” I exclaimed.

“This is just the place to get rid of the habit,” replied the professor. “I am here to help you. I think that when you get rid of that habit you will make a fair showing in public speech. Now that you are aware of it, you will be on your guard.”

I made known my discovery at the waiter’s table at noon, and instantly my friends poured[123] out for my consideration a whole museum of sentences I had originated in their hearing and over which they had secretly smiled. It seems I had said, “’Ave you got your ’at, Brock?” and “Will you ’ave another Hegg, please?” and “Look hout for this ’ot water!” When the waiters saw that I took the criticism in good part and was eagerly anxious to rid my speech of that defect, they were instant and sometimes severe in their criticisms; with the result that in a very short while I gained the advantage over my “h’s” and somewhat tamed them.

With the mastery of my “h’s” and the daily discipline in the oratorical class came an overmastering desire to make a public speech. I thought that if I could accomplish that I should vindicate myself so far as I had gone in my education. It should be the first milestone in my school career. The opportunity was given in a proposed oratorical contest to be held in the village church. I took Thropper into my confidence as I prepared my original oration. Into this I tried to exemplify every admirable rule of rhetoric and every stern rule of logic and every manner of long, short, periodic, balanced, and climactic sentence I was then learning in Rhetoric. I marshalled historical allusions, read widely in the library hour after hour. Then, when I had put myself through this profitable discipline and had typewritten my manuscript—the final triumph of my educational career[124] thus far—I was ready for rehearsals. After I had practised alone and as the evening of the contest drew near, I asked Thropper if each evening after supper he would accompany me into the woods and listen while I delivered my oration. He consented, cheerfully enough. That same evening he accompanied me to the pastures in the rear of the University. I poised myself seriously on a stump, while Thropper stood with his back to the wind in a waiting attitude. I had not delivered more than two paragraphs of my speech before there came a yell from behind me and a half-dozen students ran shouting, applauding and screaming before me. When the crowd of interrupters had exhausted their animal spirits, I said to them, addressing them from the stump,

“I’ve a good mind to invite you to stand out there near Thropper and listen!”

“Why not?” they demanded.

“If you can’t address a bunch of farmers like these,” smiled Thropper, “you won’t be able to stand up in church before three hundred people and give it. Go ahead!”

I did, and the result was that the students rallied about me at the end, carried me on their shoulders, shouting, mockingly,

“Hail to the new Webster!” and to show their approval of me, they sat me astride a rail and would have given me a ride home on that conveyance had not Thropper prevented it.

[125]The evening of the contest arrived and with it the seating of seasoned, experienced, graceful, prize-winning orators, in comparison with whom I knew I should not and could not under any stretch of the imagination be placed. I wanted to give a speech in public, that was the height to which my expectancy went, but, of course, I had to set before me the prizes that were offered and be prepared for “accidents.” When my turn came and I faced that illimitable sea of white faces, I felt my feet slip from under me while I seemed to float above this conscious world. Then I picked out an interested face in the far, far corner of the church. At him I threw my strident voice, determined to make him hear what I had to say. The result was, in Thropper’s words, “Priddy, it seemed that you placed your pitch on top of the highest mountain in the world, and after that it was a scream, that’s all, old fellow. That was due to inexperience.”

But this failure was atoned for when the judges especially commented on the “careful thought,” “the good English,” and “the excellent form of the written oration” and when they marked me in second place on the literary side of the matter, I felt repaid with my first adventure into public speech. I felt that I had vindicated the struggles I had set before me, through the long years, to go through the school.

[126]

## Chapter XII. The Personnel of
“The Clamorous Eight” and other
Social Matters. The “Blepoes”
and the “Boulomaies” Invite me
into Fellowship with a Protest from
Jason. Epics and Lyrics of Love.
“Pa” Borden Speaks for the
Benedicts on a Momentous Matter.
How the Magic Tree Lured Some
Unfaithful Ones from their Sworn
Duty

THE routine of that winter’s work was embroidered with many interesting social experiences. For though many of the students were stern in religious doctrine and practise, hearts were youthful and recreation was sought. Thropper belonged to a “Bachelor’s Club,” a facetious group of married and unmarried[127] male students who met every now and then for the avowed purpose of upholding the dignity of bachelordom! Thropper also joined a “Moustache Club,” whose members met and compared lip sprouts and looked forward to the day when they would be sufficiently mature to be called “moustaches.” These two institutions were more satirical than practical; outlets for the humor resident in the students. But the “Clamorous Eight” was a real institution of the noisiest, most untamed spirits of the school, seven of whom were young men and the eighth member a young, gum-chewing, blondish, hobbledehoy girl in the Business department. What we knew of the charter of the “Clamorous Eight” was in their shoutings, their numerous practical jokes, their songs, and their rebellions against the University rules. If anything of an unlawful nature occurred, like the throwing of a live rooster into the sleeping room of a sedate female monitor or the placing near the chapel door of a stuffed dummy, suspicion of its own, fluent accord fixed itself first of all on the “Clamorous Eight,” and hung there with tenacity until every member had been through a “Faculty sweat.”

There were two rival literary societies in the University and the students were supposed to be portioned out between them. The “Blepoes” or “The Seers” and the “Boulomaies”—“The Willers” sent their agents after me and[128] made a bid for my membership. These were not secret organizations, for such an institution was considered sinful by the University authorities. Their gatherings were open to the public and each student was supposed to attend the different meetings before deciding which society he would join. Jason, who considered even these literary meetings harmful to the morale of the students, on hearing that I had been asked to join one of them, sought me out and for a long mournful hour tried to make me promise to keep my name off their rolls, “For,” he whined, “they are of the Devil, brother Priddy!”

“What makes you think so?” I demanded.

“They joke in their meetings and tell light things and for every idle word God will hold us accountable!”

“But jokes and light conversation have their places in life, haven’t they?” I persisted.

Jason looked at me with his round, poet’s eyes growing rounder in wonderment.

“Lincoln couldn’t have borne the weight of the Civil War if it had not been for jokes and fun—at times,” I concluded.

“But the Bible says that for every idle word we shall have to give a full account,” said Jason. “Are not jokes idle words?”

“They don’t—eh—” I stammered, limply.

“The Bible is true, isn’t it?” went on the logician.

[129]I gave up in desperation.

“Look here, Jason,” I cried, “you might get me to give up wearing a watch-chain and a tie-pin, but you aren’t going to stop me from joining one of these societies. I want social life and I’m going to have it, jokes or no jokes. I’m not so good as you on logic or Bible, but you aren’t going to stand between me and a few pleasures. Don’t some of the faculty belong to the Blepoes and the Boulomaies? If they can join without scruples—and they are Christian men and women—I can join. So it’s no use arguing the matter with me, Jason. I think I’ll send in my name to the Blepoes for the next meeting.”

And I did join myself to the Blepoes and partook of their suppers, their programs, and even went so far one night as to appear on the platform myself, before a blackboard on which I drew sketches to illustrate a temperance address, and at the conclusion of which I recited with great fervor and many gestures, Kipling’s “Recessional.”

That winter, too, though far outside of love, and even the thoughts of love, in the seriousness of my tasks, I looked on little epics and little lyrics of love between man and woman. Thropper himself had Cupid’s dart in his heart and his rhapsodies concerning his “luck” and his “happiness” and “her wonderful sweet spirit” were only a few of many indications of the depth[130] to which he had fallen in love. Those of us who were not enamored of love had to be diplomatic in making engagements to walk or exercise with the boys, for there were times and seasons when Thropper and his fellow-lovers devoted themselves exclusively to their fiancées. For instance, there was lecture night in Pubbets Junction, six miles away, and on that evening, under chaperonage, the couples would seat themselves in carriages and not be back till midnight, returning to tell the bachelors and maidens the next morning the expressive points of the lecture and any exciting episodes of the trip, like the adventure of the wheels up to the axles in mud and a plunging horse pulled out by a nearby farmer, the adventure which befell Thropper and his love when they were on their way to hear Sam Small lecture. Those among us, like myself, who were not concerned with sentiment, held various speculative conferences, on Sunday evenings, as to how this and that student would mate. We had precedent to argue from, for we had seen Donald Bryce, a laughing-eyed Evangelist-to-be, pick out Clara Trine, an athletic and extremely conscientious Missionary-to-be. We had seen one of the “Clamorous Eight,” a light-haired, flush-cheeked banker-to-be, sort out and become deeply attached to the female member of the “Eight,” the blondish hobbledehoy, whom we judged, like grocery store[131] sages, would at least fit herself to spend quickly enough what money he should chance to make as a banker.

These loving couples considerably colored our social life and often made the University picnics problems. When the first touch of spring pervaded the gassy atmosphere and, at least, suggested the scent of coming flowers and grassy banks, notice was given out by Brock one Saturday morning that the usual spring trip to the river would be undertaken and that each one who went should go to the kitchen and prepare a lunch from materials that would be furnished by the cooks.

After the breakfast a meeting of the excursionists was held in the reception room, presided over by Brock, who announced,

“Now, friends, this year—mind you, this year, we are going to keep together. In the past, on our excursions, there has been altogether too much coupling up and going off alone. That has spoiled more than one excursion and it is not the fair thing. Is it?”

A chorus of “Noes” gave emphasis to his protest and appeal.

“This time, though,” he went on to explain, “we are to keep together. No matter if you are in love with the sweetest girl on earth and can’t be alone much under the University rules, you are not to wander off when we get out of bounds and not come around to the main[132] party again until lunch time and then go off and not return till it is time to come home. What have you to say about it, Brother Borden?”

“Pa” Borden, thus appealed to, raised his pompous head, cleared his throat after the best mode of the orator, and said,

“I’m married myself and maybe shouldn’t have much to say on the matter. I agree with everything’s been said: agree with it hard!” and to give oratorical force to his last word, he brought his plump fist down on the centre table, thereby spilling half the water out of the glass which held in it a sprig of geranium.

A representative of the Benedicts having been heard, Thropper, as representing the unmarried was asked for his opinion. He replied,

“Of course we ought to keep together. I’m certain of it, Mr. Chairman. That’s all I need to say!”

At nine o’clock the excursionists started for the river forty-five people strong. To prove the sincerity of the social aspect of the excursion, Thropper and the other lovers separated themselves from their beloveds and walked, sacrificially, either with other young women or mingled freely with the male members of the party! Thus two by two and three by three we walked down the rutted, soggy lane past the root-fenced sheep pastures where the woolly young lambs squeaked and bleated like crying[133] children, down past the grove where the wood-choppers were measuring cord wood; past dismal, wind-swept forests of burnt stumps and rusty underbrush, over which desolation huge vultures soared, and pivoted themselves in wait for prey; past clayey roads over which mud boats were dragged by struggling horses and oxen, past pig-pastures torn up by the sniffing snouts of the ruminants. Then we entered a fresh, dampish wood-path which led us along the rocky bed of a river over which a thin stream of water churned with great energy as if to impress us with its importance. At last we entered a cleared grass space over which the sun held itself and lighted gloriously the deep pool of water the river had become. Here we deposited our lunch boxes and began to arrange our games. So far the party had remained one, much to the admiration of Brock. But now, after the lunch boxes had been unloaded, a rearrangement of the party began to take place. Thropper, who had been walking and talking with me, hurried over to the side of his beloved, and said:

“There’s a magic tree farther along the path, growing right through a big boulder, about which there’s a legend of Indians. I’ll tell you about it!”

That was all. They two passed out of sight while the angry Brock gazed speechlessly after them. That was the signal for other couples[134] who wanted to see the “magic tree,” and to such an extent did the defection of the lovers take place, that before long only two couples remained with the bachelors to share the games we tried to play.

By the lunch hour, however, they came from their expeditions from this side and that, unapologetic for leaving us, came to eat their lunches and then go off again, paying no heed to Brock’s impassioned appeal to their esprit de corps. When the hour for the return to the University arrived, the couples returned and then either went ahead, arm in arm, or loafed behind, immersed in their own thoughts; leaving us bachelors to amuse ourselves by bantering flings at them, which, however, were no more than peas aimed at the mailed shell of an armadillo.

“It’ll be the same over again next time!” growled Brock. “These lovers—oh!”

[135]

## Chapter XIII. How One Dollar
and a Half Secured “The
Devil in Society.” The Medicine
Chest which Became a Tract Depository
under the Teachings of a
New Creed. How I Stuck to
Orthodoxy

THE spring was full upon us, with the return of the birds, the tang of the new plowed soil in the sugar-field where the “University Mare” tugged listlessly at the plow whose blade sliced through the clayey earth leaving back of it shiny, damp slices on which the birds stood and pecked up the exposed grubs and worms. The dynamite wagon with its frail springs and its dangerous load jogged by along the turnpike on its way to newly-bored oil-wells. Flocks of sheep with an accompanying host of maximum-legged lamblets passed over the turnpike on their way to the railroad-cars, to be followed by grunting packs of hogs directed[136] by sapling-armed drovers who in one minute of speech profaned the whole English language. Chugging traction-engines, hauling plows and harrows and on their way to hundred-acred wheat and corn fields, passed in the night-time with their shrill whistle-screams for water and their explosive puffing and puffing as if no breath in their steel bodies could successfully spurt them through the soft mire.

Thropper said to me, one afternoon,

“Priddy, how would you like to sell books?”

“Sell books, Thropper?”

Thropper nodded.

“What for?” I asked, interestedly.

“For money, of course, Priddy! What do you think?”

“It takes talk to sell books, Thropper!”

“Then you ought to make a success at the business, Priddy!”

“What’s the book?”

“‘The Devil in Society, or High Life in Washington by an Ex-Congressman,’” quoted Thropper.

“Sensational, then?”

“A moral book—with a lesson,” laughed Thropper, “pepper to make you know that it stings, you see, Priddy. Fifty per cent on each one. Buy them for seventy-five cents, sell for dollar and a half. Easy money, everybody wants the book on sight. I’ll loan you three dollars for four if you want. Sure to sell them!”

[137]“Anything to get some cash,” I cried. “Besides this would take me on Saturday trips into the surrounding towns. That would be quite an adventure after staying here throughout the winter. Will you show me the book?”

“‘Pa’ Borden will bring one around tonight. He’s the general agent,” declared my roommate.

In the evening, before the half-past seven bell had signalled silence and study, “Pa” Borden had displayed the book to us. It was a lurid green cloth-bound affair in which the glue showed in the web of the cloth, printed with blotched, worn type on the cheapest of cheap paper and interspersed with amateurish wood-cuts of which I recall a drunken revel in a ball-room and some ballet-dancer-garbed women on a seashore with wooden waves indicated by wavy lines. I was no connoisseur of literature at the time and took as solemn truth “Pa” Borden’s words that “anything that was of the Devil ought to be showed up, even if it cost a dollar and a half!” I allowed Thropper to get me four of the books and placed myself under his instructions for a week during which time I learned how to point out the chief items of interest in the illustrations when they were upside down, to give a kinetoscopic view of the table of contents, and to end by flashing the record of previous sales before the astonished housewife’s eyes before she could make up her mind whether she wanted the book or not.

[138]The following week, then, after engaging a substitute waiter for the day I accompanied Thropper to Pubbets Junction to place “The Devil in Society.” The first door on which I knocked chanced to be that of a Christian Science Reader, a very highly cultivated and sweet-spirited woman who, the minute I announced that I was agent for a book entitled “The Devil in Society” immediately knocked my “patter” hors de combat by announcing, firmly, that there was no such thing as a Devil and that it was all a delusion of mortal mind, adding various other remonstrances of a philosophical, semi-philosophical, and dogmatic nature which I was in no mood or mind to combat. Besides bewildering me in the intellectual meshes of that new doctrine, the woman made me sit in her office and listen to a fascinating recital of her household’s progress from a drug-store of drugs to an empty medicine chest: to a radical change in the family temper from semi-pessimism into a real sunburst of glorious, mellowing optimism: to an intricate and involved interpretation of the Old Testament and then in a very cloudy but, to me, excitingly suggestive denial of all facts that men and books had told me were positive and real. All this, of course, was the precursor to an attempt to proselyte me to the faith of Christian Science. After she had shown me the empty medicine chest, which she was then using as a store-house for[139] all sorts of Christian Science literature, I told her that I had learned a great deal that was both new and novel, that I would think it over seriously, but that I should never believe in anything but orthodoxy. Then I called at the next house and many other houses, so that by noon, when I met Thropper at a candy store, where we lunched on a glass of milk and some Washington pie, I had sold two books and earned one dollar and a half. In the flush of that success, I returned to the University, ready to repeat the excursion the following and several other Saturday mornings. According to Thropper’s epigram, “The Devil in Society” meant dollars in our pockets!

[140]

## Chapter XIV. A Chapter Depicting
how Strife Existed Between
the Pro-Gymnasiums and the Anti-Gymnasiums
and Showing how
Baseball, Debates and an Epidemic
Determined Matters This
Way and That

NEXT to its faith in religion an extreme abhorrence of matched athletic games pervaded the ruling spirits of the University and found its sanction in the charter of the institution. In the Bleponian and Boulomanian literary societies the characteristic discussion for heated and vigorous debate, next to the eternal question: Does Love or Money Rule the World? was: Are Athletic Contests Moral? The charter and advertisements of the University said very emphatically that they were not and should not be tolerated by Christian people. Jason and his Board of[141] Pharisees agreed with the University. On the other hand, there were many young men and women who had an opposite mind and took issue on every occasion with Jason and the authorities. Thus one could find them on every occasion in the springtime when the fields and the paved paths lured forth whatever sporting proclivities nature had deposited in the blood, Jason and his followers firmly insisting that under no consideration should a contest of any sort—even a game of checkers or “Pit” be countenanced, as it led to gambling, and, if not to gambling, then to unchristian feeling. This feeling became acute when the students began to discuss the necessity for an athletic field and a gymnasium: a very hypothetical discussion remote and probably ever to remain remote, for the University had need of money for more impending goods than gymnasiums. But Jason’s party argued as if the gymnasium were about to be built, and said that it would only lead young men into racing for prizes!—and competing for wagers! The party was called the Anti-Gymnasiums.

Thropper and I aligned ourselves to the Pro-Gymnasiums, for, as Thropper said to me:

“My kneecaps fairly creak for need of stretching. As for my arm joints and muscles, they pain me on the least provocation. I need proper, systematic exercise.”

The Pro-Gymnasiums were thoroughly represented[142] by “The Clamorous Eight,” whose faces and veins throbbed with healthy, well-exercised blood; in fact, they were eight who cared for little else beyond exercise of muscles.

The program of the Blepoes one Friday evening was devoted to the debate of the question: “Resolved: That the Bible Prohibits Athletic Contests.” Larry Thomas, who debated for the Pro’s and who was almost as well versed in biblical lore as was Jason, argued well, basing his strongest rhetoric on Paul’s words: “I so run that I may receive a prize,” and “I box, not as beating the air,” but, as Larry paraphrased it, freely, “to give a knock-out, pure and simple, a plain indication that Paul believed in the prize-ring and the running-track!” The Anti’s, realizing the force of these quotations, attempted to minimize their power by arguing, “Oh, Paul was only using the common terms of his day; the ordinary experiences of unchristian men, to represent to them the Christian life. That was all. He was not giving sanction to sports.” This explanation, the judges informed us, considerably helped the Anti’s, but the debate was declared a draw.

Evangelical University was Treated to its First Match Game

One Saturday morning when the air was crammed with the warmth and lassitude of early summer, and a considerable number of Pro-Gymnasiums were playing scrub baseball, one of the “Clamorous Eight,” in a fit of healthy rebellion against the University, proposed:

[143]“Say, fellows, this knocking out a ball is too tame. Let’s choose up sides. There’s no harm in it!”

Thropper, who was not working that day, and myself, were among those enjoying the sport, and in the excitement and thoughtlessness of the minute we consented. I was placed in the field, Thropper went in the catcher’s box. We even engaged the services of an umpire, though few were found from whom we could select a capable official. Many of the Pro’s dared not come into the game, but stood off ready to look on an incident that should become historic, like a Civil War or a French Revolution: the first matched game ever played on the University grounds!

Jason looked on the opening of the game with horror. To him it seemed that the Evil One had just made his bold appearance in the morale of the institution. When he heard the umpire’s decisions and saw the sides changing positions, and realized at last that the whole event had actually developed into a matched game, he hurried to the home of the Dean and gave notice of the rebellion that he had scented. Instantly the authorities came, ordered the game disbanded, took our names for Faculty discipline, and we left the field to the Anti’s, who sincerely believed that Satan himself had been flouted.

But even the anti-match spirit of Jason and[144] his band could not eliminate from their joints and muscles the need of exercise, and while they argued against the advent of contested sports, they could be found on the cinder walk after supper, previous to the evening prayer-service, leaping, bounding, twisting, and jumping, Jason in competition manifesting the grace of a rheumatic frog.

Shortly after this an epidemic of disease broke out in the village. The University was quarantined—even from attendance at the village church services. The momentousness of this is plainly evident when it is remembered that it was these church services which gave to the University lovers their chance to walk together, sit together, sing and pray and talk together; consequently the quarantine imposed a severe restriction upon the poor unfortunates.

When Sunday dawned, glorious with the summer sun, some of the members of Jason’s clique together with their young ladies took their black-bound Bibles and sat under the campus saplings for Bible study: two in a class and every sapling shade occupied.

But the Dean, who hated sham of every sort, interrupted these classes and the next morning in chapel he had some very emphatic and pointed remarks to make on the subject: “The Sacrilege of Pretending to Study the Bible when You are Doing Nothing but Make Love!”

It was the Pro-gymnasiums’ turn to laugh then.

[145]

## Chapter XV. A Ph.D. in a
Clay Ditch and the Futility of it.
A Can of Beans at the Conclusion
of a Morbid Meditation. How
Thropper and I Played David
and Jonathan

THE first summer vacation brought joy to a majority of the students, but to me it merely meant a lonely isolation for three months on the campus where I was accustomed to watch my friends move back and forth hour after hour through the day. They went out with tents: the Evangelists. They went out with books: the canvassers. They went out with brawn and health: the miners and farmers. They left me alone to share the solitude of the campus with the few professors who were not going to conferences, and with the superintendent of grounds, whose assistant I was to be.

The winter’s struggle, though pleasant, had[146] left me tired and listless. I needed a rest, but saw no possibility of any. I had few good clothes and no money. Any adventure into the world would have been utter folly. So I began to scrub floors in the University building, to mow the grass, and trim the flowers. I painted and scraped and hung wall paper, all in the silences of the dormitories once full of merry sounds, the recollections of which doubled the loneliness I suffered from.

Meanwhile I made my home in the little room where we had held our feast in honor of Queen Victoria’s birthday. In it stood the stove on which I cooked my own meals: canned goods, tea, and sundry fries of bacon, eggs, ham, and potatoes. Here, too, I washed my clothes.

During a lull in the work, one of the married students, who had been given his Ph.B. at commencement asked me to go with him to the outskirts of the village where some eight-inch gas pipes were to be laid. He wanted me to join him at the shovel! At the time I weighed but one hundred and twenty pounds. The foreman put us in a clay ditch under a scalding July sun with a gang of knotted-muscled, tanned Irishmen to whom the picking of dried lumps of clay and the shovelling of heaps of it were mere items of a day’s work to be done mechanically, but for my friend and myself tasks for Titans. The Irishmen at my heels kept passing[147] me, doubling on me, until, after a two days’ attempt, with the lure of twenty-five cents an hour for the prize, my friend with his Ph.B. and I with my ambitions fell out of the race and rode wearily back to the village and to the University, where for days neither of us was fit for even so simple a task as lifting a pound weight; the excessive strain had undermined our strength.

While recuperating, I was given food by the superintendent and spent most of my time wandering into the woods or through the sheep pastures where my uppermost thought was: “What is the use of all this? It is weariness and a vanity of the flesh. Give up your education! You must have money and strength, money and strength, money and strength!” And then the thought of my classmates would obtrude itself and I saw them in visions at their tasks, at their homes, in the full enjoyment of work, companionship, and wages. I seemed to hear, borne on the summer wind, above the bleating of the sheep, the exhortations of the evangelists in their tents which were crowded with farmers, paying heed to the gospel, and I was envious of them. I thought of the miners deep under the earth, black with their toil but happy in earning a substantial wage; strong, oh, so strong! My fight for an education, when contrasted with their natural endowments of strength and friendships, seemed puny,[148] futile. In such a way did the black demon Despair lay its sharp claws on my spirit and make it bleed. I would start back across the field, not heeding the innocent, questioning gaze of the sheep as they packed off and watched me go, not watching the swift circlings of the sombre vultures high above my head, but going back to my lonely room feeling that I should never have another flash of happiness flood my life again. Then I would get out the can-opener, uncover a can of beans, and warm them on the stove for supper.

But everything has its end, even as my homesickness and discouragement had their ending when the students came back once more, bringing others with them. They came back flushed with eagerness for another year’s work; eager once more to invest themselves in sacred ties of friendship. Thropper came back with a hundred dollars: his summer’s earnings. I reported that I had just managed to pay my last year’s tuition and my summer’s board: I could enter upon my second year of education with a clean slate.

Once more the round of studies, prayer-meetings, and chores commenced: this time with less of novelty. The approach to winter brought with it the same questions of how to earn cash. To this end I went into the woods for a day and tried to chop down trees, but my arms were not attuned to axe swinging; after my first cord[149] had been cut I had to abandon the quest for dollars in that healthful but too vigorous work. I returned to the University and assisted the baker with bread and pies and the janitor with the university floors; the money to be credited against my account on the books.

But I realized at last that I was in the midst of inestimable privileges. The studies awakened me to the possibilities of culture and mental fitness. Some of my last year’s friends had entered upon the pleasant vocations of teaching and business for which they received a moderate, but, as it appeared to me, a flattering compensation. Thropper—ever on the alert with inspiration—comforted me one night when my empty pockets had induced a pessimistic frame of mind, by saying:

“Now look here, Priddy. Suppose you don’t have any money and have to scrimp on things. Here you are privileged to take extra studies every day; a millionaire’s son couldn’t do more. You don’t have to lose a term of study, either. You are going along through the schedule about as comfortably as any one. That’s worth a good deal. There’s Harry Lane—got plenty of money, but you know he was compelled to drop out for a term on account of bad eyes. You’re lucky, old fellow!” and the good-natured fellow gave me a staggering, but well-meant, clap on the shoulder that knocked every ounce of pessimism out of my system.

[150]“I am in luck, Thropper. I know it!” I declared, and then went to my study with new courage. “The only trouble about the whole matter, Thropper,” I declared, after some moments of quietness, “is that I am making the fight alone—no one to rely on if I get stuck, you know. The other fellows can depend upon more or less from friends—I can’t; all those bridges are cut behind me!”

Thropper closed his book with an energetic snap.

“You Chump!” he exclaimed, with a melting light in his clear eyes, “what do you think? That you haven’t won any friends since coming to the University? That’s where you’re wrong: sadly out of tune! All you have to do, any day, is to say the word and you can get any amount I have on hand!”

I jumped to my feet and said, very gently, “Thropper, you’re all right!”

Then, without another word, for the situation was getting close to the edge of tears, Thropper threw himself in his stuffed chair and I sat on the edge of the bed, under the hissing flare of the gas, both of us as busy as could be with the next day’s lessons.

[151]

## Chapter XVI. Visions, Hysteria,
Dogma, and Poor Lessons to the
Front when the Revivalists Arrived.
How Natural it Sounded
when “Bird” Thurlow Asked a
Flippant Question

THEN the annual winter revival was announced. Upon this event the University centered all its prayers, its hopes, its attention, as the banner event of the year. In the church papers where the advertisement of the University appeared, the annual revival was featured. Several of the students had been sent to the institution by their parents principally for the spiritual benefits that might come to them in the atmosphere of the revival.

The whole air began to stir with the throb of revival preparation. A spiritual census of the students was taken, not officially or in any stereotyped way, and all the energy of Christian effort was brought to bear on creating[152] the right, psychological mood for the time the evangelists should arrive. The prayer bands wove in extra meetings and increased their unction. Neglected, after-supper prayer-services were suddenly filled. Bands of earnest, zealous men and women roamed from room to room holding spiritual inquisitions over “The Clamorous Eight” and any others who were thought to need special portions of grace.

“I’m heartily in favor of Christian effort,” I said to Jason, one day, when we were talking over the coming revival, “but take last year and think how many hours were lost to study and given to the meetings! I should think that those things might be left to camp-meetings and churches—there were three long revivals in the village last winter—and we ought to center our precious time on study!”

Jason declared, emphatically and finally, “Brother Priddy, what are heads compared to souls?”

“Oh, I don’t object to any sort of efforts being indulged if people are to be made Christian, Jason, but according to what you said in the prayer-meeting last night, there are only three in the whole University who do not make any profession of religious faith: just three, and yet two whole weeks are to be set apart to the Evangelists who will come and preach the ‘third-birth doctrine’ and other dogmatic matters. That is what I protest against.”

[153]Again Jason answered with his inclusive, “Brother Priddy, what are heads compared to souls?”

By the time the revivalists appeared it had been announced in the prayer-service that not one of the students stood “outside the Christian fold.” The revivalists had a clear chance, then, to preach the special doctrine of “the third-birth,” without any further parley.

The revivalists were a man and his wife, both of them uneducated, whose chief claim to merit in their field lay in the fact that they were said to be “filled with the Spirit.” In spite of the bad grammar, the mixed figures of rhetoric, traces of demagogism, and an excessive ex cathedra tone, the revivalists were given full power in the meetings. All interests in pure scholarship were crowded aside. The valedictorian, the temperance orator who had won the interstate oratorical prize, the professors, and the humble seeker after knowledge were subordinated to the zealot, the exhorter, the unctuous pleader.

In morning chapel the time was generously lengthened to accommodate the doctrinal exhortations of the revivalist and his wife, who spake not so much of practical concerns, but entered into a bewildering maze of Scripture quibblings, text jugglings, super-rational conclusions, and a daze of fantastic analogies. When the closing bell sounded, the speaker[154] would turn to the President and say, familiarly—even commandingly, “Well, brother, studies can wait on the Lord, can’t they?” and the President had nothing to say but, “Yes.” The morning exhortations infringed on our nine o’clock classes so that often they had to be discontinued; much to the reluctance of the professors who had to bear the brunt of the intellectual disqualifications of students at graduation time.

As the meetings continued, in the evenings, the enthusiasm increased. When emotions were running at flood the meetings were carried well into the night and Thropper and I often did not reach our room until eleven o’clock—with all opportunity for study taken away. But again the professors had to lose, for if any of us were backward with lessons the next morning, by saying, “Professor, I was at the meeting last night. I did not have any opportunity to study,” a proper adjustment was made in our favor. For, as Jason had said, the theory at that time was, “What are heads compared to souls?”

At the conclusion of the first Thursday evening’s meeting, the revivalist and his wife let it be known that “At last God is blessing us!” High tide had been reached. That meeting had been given into the hands of the students after the leader had preached for an hour on a doctrinal theme. A hymn was started by a young woman. She stood while she led the[155] singing and at the conclusion she still stood erect, with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She had thrown herself into a trance and spoke in a jumble some words nobody could decipher but which were understood to be a “revelation.” That was the signal for a wild demonstration. Jason leaped to his feet and after shouting, “God is with us! Emmanuel!” he sat shivering in his seat as if his body were in the grasp of angry spirits. A group of young women paraded down the aisles and before the pulpit waving their handkerchiefs and shouting in shrill ecstasy. Suddenly one of the young men near me burst into lamentations and tears, moaning as if his heart would break. Meanwhile the evangelists knelt at the front of the platform in prayer; praying for people by name. Then the young man who had been crying suddenly darted to his feet and broke into a torrent of wild, hysterical laughter and ran to the upper end of the room clapping his hands. Hymns of different sorts and tunes had broken out in different parts of the room, making a musical Babel. The young woman who had had the trance came into consciousness again, and, on the urgence of the revivalists, ascended the platform from whence she described a vision fit to be framed in Miltonic verse. At eleven o’clock hands were joined, a hymn was sung, and after a benediction from “Pa” Borden, we went back to our rooms.

[156]Then the revivalists with their honors full on them departed, and the emotional tension left us. It was a distinct relief, like a bit of bird’s chatter after the epic storm, to hear “Bird” Thurlow shout across the walk, one morning, “Hey, Paddy, going to take Miss Adee to the lecture next Wednesday?”

[157]

## Chapter XVII. My Presidential
Pose and its Central Place in “The
Record.” A Wistful Glance and
Some Practical Plans towards
Eastern Education. How the
Little Sparrow Brought my Class
Colors to me as I Gave the Class
“Oration.” Ends in a Fight

IN the spring, when announcements of Commencement and Graduation were in the air, a gathering of four members of the collegiate department, as many members of the preparatory division, two business students, and five who could not be classified by reason of their slowness to master their studies, met in response to a call, sent out by the Seniors, for the members of the Freshmen Class to elect officers, and after due deliberation made me their president.

With this honor thrust on me, I was immediately[158] in a dilemma, for the main purpose of the class organization was to have each member’s photograph in the Senior’s “Record,” a souvenir book of the University life. Had I been other than the president, I should not have fretted about my inability to afford a visit to the picture gallery, but there I was: due to have my picture in the middle of the group. I was in despair until finally I thought of little Jack Borden, who owned a three-dollar camera. I told him my predicament and he consented to make a snap-shot of me for ten cents that should be fit to be in the center of a group of “gallery ones” as he termed those that the official photographer would take.

As Jack had no photographer’s background, he snapped me with my back to the flowered wall paper, and when the finished picture was handed me, there I sat, outlined against a mass of conventional crocus leaves and a picture of “Pa” Borden hung on the wall above my head! I was told by one of “The Record” Committee that the picture would never be fit to reproduce with such a background: that it should be in relief against a plain one. I returned to my room in despair, but finally resolved to cut my picture out from the wall paper and paste it on a piece of plain, black pasteboard. After going over the outline with the scissors I finally succeeded in accomplishing the feat and the picture went in the middle of the group, an undignified,[159] flat, ill-posed, and somewhat jagged outline of myself, most conspicuous as “the president.”

As the year drew to an end, and the students began to talk so emotionally of home and friends, I began to feel that I had been long enough in exile from my eastern home and friendships. I also began to wonder if now that I had learned the art of working a way through school I should not be more comfortable in Massachusetts. I had heard the graduating students talk of “Dartmouth” and “Boston University” and “Yale” and “Harvard,” with a sort of worshipful accent, not far short of reverence. One or two graduates in the past, so the local legend ran, had even attained to post-graduate work in Yale and Harvard! Therefore, as I heard this talk, listened to this semi-worship of New England education, and realized that it was my home, my own environment, I also asked myself the question: “Why not go and complete your education in that atmosphere?”

I mentioned this fact to Thropper. He said to me:

“I have often wondered, Priddy, why you came away out here for your education when you have such good schools in New England. I should think you’d be able to work your way along out there and get some mighty fine chances. I just wish I had been an Easterner!”

“I’ve a good mind to go East when school closes, Thropper, and try. I must confess I[160] feel lonesome, homesick out here. I miss the ocean and the hills. I can’t help it. I suppose I run the risk of not getting to school next year, though, if I break off now!”

“Not if you’re willing to work as you have,” said Thropper. “Though I’d hate to have you go. I thought you might be my right hand man when I marry, next fall!”

“Marry?”

“Yes, in September. Oh, you’ll get an invitation even if you won’t be able to attend, Priddy,” he added, solemnly, “I wouldn’t try to keep you from going East even with my wedding. Try it, old fellow. You owe it to yourself, now that you’ve got such a good start here. This place doesn’t pretend to be in competition with the big Eastern institutions. Evangelical University is concerned mostly with giving a fellow a start towards them. The faculty would be only too glad to have you leave here, if they knew you were going to stick to your education in the East.”

“I’ll do it, Thropper!” I replied.

The busy season of Commencement was ushered in: a busy time even for those of us who were far, very far from graduation. My “class” voted that I represent them with an oration on “Class Day.” No classic, intellectual, or sentimental event was Class Day at Evangelical University, but, rather, a Western outflow of burlesque and banter. Every day for a week I[161] practised my “oration” in the attic of the University building. In this speech I had put, as all previous Class Day orators had made a practise of putting, puns, alliterations, pompous passages, personalities, and much bathos. I tried to perfect myself in its delivery, not knowing just what experiences I should encounter on the day I should speak it.

A wild, untamed, yelling, crowding procession filled the chapel hall, each class in a section by itself and the “orators” seated on the platform.

It came my turn. I stepped to the front and raised my hand for the first word when suddenly the class next above mine yelled, poked up slang signs, and then from the square ventilator hole high above my head darted a sparrow with a trailing streamer of our class ribbon fluttering from its tail. At every sentence, nearly every word, I had to pause on account of the yellings, the banter, and the interruptions caused by flying hats and scudding pieces of pasteboard. After about a half hour of disciplined posing, I finally concluded the “oration” amid the admiring plaudits of my class. Thus orator followed orator, each one outdoing the other with satire, pun, and rhetorical nonsense. To the accompaniment of a thudding fight which was taking place between the representatives of two classes over our heads where the bird had been sent down, Class Day came to an end, and my active life at Evangelical University likewise.

[162]

## Chapter XVIII. Thropper Unfolds
Something Better than
Canned Foods. A Lesson with
the Flat Iron. Thropper Proposes
that I Chaperone Horses

“HOW are you going to get back to Massachusetts, Priddy?” asked Thropper when I was shuffling some photographs which I had taken down from a wire rack on the wall.

“Oh, I’ll have to try to get work in a factory or on a farm about here,” I answered, “until I earn my fare!”

“Have you any definite work planned for, yet?”

“No, but I thought I’d go out this afternoon and see what I might pick up. I could keep this room and board myself, Thropper.”

He made a wry face, and blurted out:

“Warmed over canned beans, ugh!”

“What do you mean, old fellow?”

[163]“Boarding yourself—canned soups, canned meats, canned everything—ugh!”

“That’s what your wife will feed you on—at first, while she learns to cook, Thropper,” I laughed. “Perhaps you’ll prefer canned things!”

“Is that so?” he retorted, with some show of heat. “Well, that’s all you know about things. She can cook already: you just wait till you taste some of her cooking. Canned things—ugh!”

“Well,” I sighed, “I’ve little choice!”

“How would you like to spend the summer at a neat little hotel in Michigan?”

“Thropper!”

“And room in a little cottage in the midst of a little grove of pines, near little sandhills, among a little group of the finest fellows in the world—college students?” continued Thropper, with a smile.

“A little bit too much imagination in your little talk, my dear little fellow!” I retorted.

“And go down to the beach every day for a bath among the big waves, and go boating and fishing; seeing the great crowds of excursionists and vacationists!”

“Go on,” I gasped, “have it out, Thropper, if you particularly enjoy the stunt!”

“Food,” continued my roommate, “well, let me see: strawberry shortcake à la much, mutton chops with bacon à la juicy, calves’ brains on toast à la delicious, hashed browned potatoes[164] à la second helping, and for desserts: cream and jellies, sherberts and pies—”

“—À la imagination, eh, Thropper,” I interrupted.

My roommate’s rugged face was overspread with a grin. He clapped me over the shoulder and said, continuing his whim:

“To enjoy many beautiful, moon-lit hours, watching the glint of the phosphorescent waves as they twinkle like fairy lights over the broad expanse of Lake Michigan; to—”

“Look out, Thropper,” I exclaimed at this poetic outburst, “or you’ll be crowding the spring poets out of a job!”

“To roam at will through the shady groves, over the sand dunes, to hear the orchestral music, the light plash of the waves against the pier while you hold a fish-line in the water; to loll on the fragrant pine needles and read, muse, rest, and be inspired: what do you think of that for a program for the next three months, Priddy?”

“Ask a Mohammedan what he thinks of Paradise or an exiled Prince what he thinks of a Kingdom, Thropper?”

“Then,” continued Thropper, “the whole experience not to cost you a cent: rather you are to be paid at the rate of four dollars a week: wages for a treat like that, Priddy: what do you think of that?”

“It is impossible for me to think about such[165] a prospect, Thropper, my imagination is intoxicated!”

“Then you will go!”

I looked at Thropper as if he had parted with his senses.

“What an actor you are, Thropper. One would imagine you serious in all this!”

“Of course I’m serious!” he announced. “I am merely offering you the chance to go with Brook and myself to Macatawa, Michigan, to wait on table at one of the hotels there.”

“Oh!”

“But all the things I have enumerated, Priddy, are facts and not dreams. The work is very easy: six hours a day; two hours a meal, with the interims filled with all sorts of good times. What do you say? Our railway fares and steamer passages will be sent and later will be deducted from our wages. Will you go?”

“Do they let the waiters eat calves’ brains on toast, Thropper?” I asked, seriously.

“Extra orders which are not taken,” he responded.

“Of course I’ll go, old fellow. It will be a wonderful chance, won’t it?”

“It will give you a good chance to get a rest, Priddy,” he averred, solemnly. “Your poor, pinched body needs it!”

“When do we leave?”

“In two days; soon as Brock gets word to[166] the hotel that we are coming. I can lend you some collars and things till we get there.”

“The first month’s wages are to go for clothes,” I announced. “All aboard for Ma-cat-a-wa: last call for dinner!” I cried, and then Thropper and I, sharers of confidences and of dreams, linked arms and waltzed crazily around the room—for sheer joy.

One week after having waltzed with Thropper over the creaky boards of the dormitory, I found myself adjusted to a new phase of existence, delicious and inspiring in its every aspect. After a lifetime spent in the midst of places where toil and only toil held the boards: after twenty years’ vision of strenuous tasks done by those about me, in mills, shops, and on the street, at last I found myself in the midst of a place set apart to idleness: where the indolent were given the palm branch, and where work, for a wonder, found itself, even by honorable people, spurned as a thing out of place.

The six hours’ work a day put at my command all the recreational advantages of the resort: the shapely sand dunes, the boardwalks through cool, shaded pine groves, the smooth, sandy, slippery beach down which one walked past artists’ studios, soap box shanties, and pretentious pillared cottages. And the water! We bathed by day and by night. In it we fished and raced. Over it we rowed in boats that were tossed like light corks from[167] engulfing wave to engulfing waves, while the life-boat man from the pier kept a sharp eye on our adventure. By its edge on a moon-light night we built a chain of fires and in the flames of them we roasted marshmallows, sang songs, and passed all sorts of banter.

In the dining-hall I met my fellow waiters and waitresses: college students, all of them, from different parts of the country. The orchestra, at dinner, played complimentary college tunes in our honor: our guests broke down all perfunctory relations and intimately entered into our ambitions. While waiting for the arrival of guests at breakfast the waiters stood under a wooden canopy in the hotel yard and ironed napkins and towels. Of course neither Thropper nor I were very expert in the laundry, but that did not excuse us from it. One day the Irishwoman, who was proprietor of the hotel, came and investigated the laundry. She paid particular attention to the manner in which I conducted the flat-iron over the towels. After watching me for some moments, during which, for a woman, she maintained a severe and terrible silence, during which perspiration poured down my face, she suddenly exploded with laughter and said:

“Ah, ah! You should see Mister Priddy use his iron. It’s a rale treat. He is that gentle on the cloths! I want you all to come around and take a lesson. You girls now,” she indicated[168] some of the college girls, “have been doing it wrong all the time!” She laughed loudly, as they gathered about my board.

Taking the iron gingerly in her massive, red, and scarred hand, the Irishwoman very gently tipped the back edge of it on a towel and deliberately, though exactly, drew the iron backward several times, lifting it from the board to carry it forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anything to get to New York, Thropper.”

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

“As soon as I can get it!” I replied.

[171]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I shall miss you, Priddy!”

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

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

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

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

The brick-paved and marvellously wide streets of Indianapolis were oppressively hot when I arrived in the city, with Gloomer’s letter of introduction to the sales-stable manager in my possession. I had to spend two days in the city before a regular auction day arrived when it would be possible for me to make a contract with the manager. I had been told that the psychological time to approach the[173] horse-dealer would be at a sale when a carload or two of horses would be made up.

During my wait, I had to harvest my cash diligently, for fear of getting stranded on the way. The four dollars in my pocket seemed indescribably trivial when measured against the gigantic journey I had between Indianapolis and New York City. I went on a side street and searched among the cheaper lodging-houses until I found one whose red, illuminated sign told me that beds there were fifteen cents a night. I went in, talked with a wizened-faced tramp of a man, and was shown up a flight of back stairs into a large, dirty-papered room, in which stood a wooden bedstead with dampish, musty coverings. As I slept that night, I was awakened by loud quarrelsome voices in the back kitchen, and from what I heard, I realized that I was sleeping in a thieves’ lodging-house. After that, I found myself waking up in nervous fright every few minutes, expecting to see the door open while some villain entered with a knife or gun to strip me of what little I owned! It was a night of horror, of wakeful, excited, dread. I was afraid to sleep, and yet I kept waking, hour after hour, with the consciousness that I had given in to sleep, and had made it possible for some one to overpower me. Then early morning dawned, without any accident befalling me, and I seized upon an excuse to leave. I went downstairs very stealthily and confronted[174] three ragged, evil-faced men who were sitting on chairs, smoking with the landlord. I emptied a half-dozen soiled collars on the table and said:

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

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

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

After the sales had been concluded, I approached[175] a cubby-hole, which was filled with stale tobacco smoke through which I had a view of lithographs of race horses. The manager of the stables sat at his desk, apparently not busy, but eloquent in cigar smoke over the sales he had made that day. He had a blown, raw face, as red as his sunset shirt bosom and dotted with unshaved blotches of bristles. His thin nose had been turned aside by a blow of some sort, his mild blue eyes might not have been out of place in a woman’s head. However, on seeing me hesitate, and probably knowing from my abject, petitioning manner, that I was after some favor, he flavored the air with an oath and tacked on an impatient demand as to my wants. I thereupon unfolded what was in my heart, and in the nervousness of the moment, instead of handing him Gloomer’s letter of introduction, gave him, instead, my pocket comb. Then I thought he would horse-whip me, but, instead, he laughed, and said:

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

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

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

I thought of the small amount of money in[176] my pocket, and of the distance at which I found myself from home, and then said:

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

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

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

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

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

At six o’clock I appeared in the terminal freight yards with a bag of three-cent egg sandwiches under one arm and with my slate-colored suit-case bumping against my shins. It was not until I reached the yards and beheld the illimitable maze of tracks and the innumerable dragon-like trains of freight cars and the hive of busy, shifting engines that were making up trains, that I realized how wise I had been by coming a half hour early. I asked a switchman[177] where I should find the freight which left for Buffalo at half-past six. Then I realized still more acutely that my difficulties were only begun, for after he had whirled the lever over and allowed the section of shunted cars to rattle past, he turned to me and with a very decided and pugilistic gesture, asked me if I would not immediately consign myself and all my ancestors to a very negative theological place. I stumbled over the switches and as I went felt the hot, resentful glare of the railroad crews, as they refused me the information I sought and spiced their refusals with peppery idioms. They would have buffeted me had I not been armed by the pass. Finally, knowing that I was in danger of losing my train, I entered the switch-house and after I had gulped a stomachful of pipe-smoke, one of the men told me that I should find the train if I would look for the numbers of the cars which were written on the pass. So I went out in the dim twilight and tried to match numbers, which to my startled, nervous imagination looked like 54679900993259 and 563780533255555555573275, but which, in reality, were an inch or two shorter! Finally I found the two numbers, and then I eagerly ran down the length of the train until I came to the caboose. I climbed up the steps, opened the dusty door and was immediately greeted by the angry gaze of the conductor and brakemen who were busy with some sort of schedules.

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

When the train started, and the crew were sitting around with nothing to do, I tried to enter into conversation with one of them. But I was persona non grata; of a different caste, I was told to “hang my lip on the clothes-hook,” a grewsome feat and quite a poetic conception. The window, a little square one, was high above my head. I stood on the seat in the attempt to look through it into the night. Immediately I was told to “switch off.” Then I made myself comfortable for the night by spreading myself at full length on the seat. After a time,[179] the fumes of the lamp drugged me into a doze, and then the thunder of the freight and the dull, dull rumble of the train crew’s voices sent me off into a fretful, but long sleep. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, and looked out of the back door window, we were passing stations in Ohio. The morning was very pleasant, and thinking that a whole night of my presence might have made the train crew tolerant, I ascended into the lookout, above the roof of the caboose, where, from the cushioned seat, I could make a splendid observation of country through which we were passing. But my joy was short-lived. Immediately the thunders of the conductor called me down and I was sternly ordered to “sit down where you belong,” a command which was followed by a descriptive phrase which linked me to a low and disreputable order of creation.

By nine o’clock we brought up in the Cleveland yards, where a new caboose and a new train were to be fastened to the freight. I was told to “grab” my belongings and “git the-twelfth-letter-of-the-alphabet out of this!” which I did, and found, when I got to the ground, that the freight train had gone off and left the caboose standing in the yard. Then I went on a frightful, heart-thumping search for the two cars with the long numbers on them: not spending any time to be rebuffed by the yard men. I leaped from track to track and searched car[180] after car until, at last, I found the numbers I wanted, and by following out the length of the train, came to the new caboose.

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

In one of the back streets of Buffalo I found a Temperance Hotel, where beds and rooms were fifteen cents a day. The hotel had in its[181] frowsy lobby a group of unkempt men who seemed to be temperate in one thing more strikingly than another,—work, for during any part of the day I found them there tipped back in the chairs holding their conferences on momentous matters. I left my umbrella with the clerk for collateral, and told him that further security for my board would be my suit-case which was certainly worth thirty-five cents. I had a good thirty-cent dinner in the dining-room, and then went out to visit the stock-yards of the city.

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

During this wait I found that my money was nearly gone. I had fifty cents on hand for board. I asked a disreputable fellow, near the Temperance Hotel, where I could get some[182] cheap meals. He pointed to the next street and told me that they had three-cent meals in some of the eating-houses there. That evening I indulged in a three-cent supper. It consisted of a dish of beans, a slice of bread, some “butter” and a cup of coffee. I went to the same place for breakfast the next morning and for three cents secured a cup of coffee, a doughnut, and a dish of stew. That morning a heavy rain began to fall, and, for the first time, I began to miss the shoes I had left in the caboose. I had on a suit of good clothes, so that the worn tennis shoes on my feet were all the more startling; but when the streets were filled with running brooks of rain through which I was forced to walk, it was not merely a matter of appearance with me, but a matter of comfort. On my way to the stock-yards to see what the sales stables could do for me, my feet were uncomfortably soaked to the skin. The canvas tops of the shoes were like mops. Every step I took on the sidewalk was the cause of a soggy, moppish slop. I expected the first policeman to arrest me as a suspicious character.

I went from stable to stable, and at each one asked in a tremulous voice if they were about to send any horses to New York or Boston in the near future, but neither sales nor shipments were being made. I tried to interest some of the stock-drovers in the cattle yards in my affairs, but evidently I bored them. I paid[183] another, desperate visit to the Stockman’s Hotel, but the cattle-buyers would not give me a word of encouragement towards a pass to New York City.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The negro’s wife appeared, and from their[184] excessive interest in the watch I knew that they would purchase it if I should put out an enticing price. I cogitated in my mind as to how much I might have to pay for a pair of second-hand shoes, and then said:

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

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

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

Say, How Much Yo’ Want fo’ dat Watch

[185]“Fifty-four cents!” announced the woman.

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

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

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

After my three-cent supper, I hurried to a church where a prayer-meeting was in progress. After the meeting I made a confidant of the minister, who took me before a group of men; the total result of which was that they lent me ten dollars on a note which I later paid, or[186] tried to pay, but they refused to accept the money and sent me back my note. A scalper’s ticket to New York City took nearly all of the ten dollars. I returned to the “hotel” where I sold my umbrella and out of the proceeds paid my room rent and bade good-bye to the men who lounged there. The New York train which I had to take did not leave Buffalo until two o’clock in the morning. As I went through the quiet streets, the scavengers were out, with bags on their shoulders, fingering the refuse barrels that lined the curbs in front of hotels and eating-houses. It was a glimpse of poverty that made me shudder, and which by comparison made me feel quite aristocratic.

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

As soon as the train arrived in the New York station I had to hurry across the city to the steamboat wharves in time to board the Providence steamer for the dollar ride into the Fall River zone. Though I had never been in the metropolis before, and though I stood for a thrilling moment in the very midst of its wonders, impelling poverty drove me across the city like a slave-master’s whip, and I boarded the[187] steamer with merely an impressionistic glance of some ferry-houses, some wholesale fruit houses, a dilapidated horse-car, some street corner blockades, a whiff of Hester street, and the East River bridges. After a night in the forward part of the boat, sleeping in a berth which might have been the confines of a barrel, while a drunken man next to me kept up a periodic, loose-mouthed protest to a man in the upper berth that he wished he wouldn’t snore so loud and keep everybody awake, I was put ashore in Providence. From there I was taken by trolley into Massachusetts and home. When I arrived in New Bedford I had thirty-five cents remaining in my pocket. But I was home! And ready for the next step in my education, whatever that should be.

[188]

## Chapter XX Aunt Millie’s Interpretation
of Education. The
Right Sort of an Adviser Gets
Hold of me

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

“Hello!” I cried. “How are you?”

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

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

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

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

I gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

She burst into mocking laughter and said:

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

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

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

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

“It wouldn’t do any good if you were to ask[190] us,” she said, firmly. “We have debts enough in the house now to drive us to distraction.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two years of learning, steady,” he commented. “That’s good. You are the first Priddy to get such a chance. Make the most of it. Two years is a good beginning. I can notice[191] a difference in your speech and your manner already. Keep on, Al!”

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

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

Then my uncle asked a perfectly natural and innocent question.

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

Tremblingly I whispered:

“A preacher, I think!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At half-past twelve we left the house together and sat down on some logs on an empty lot[193] near the mill where uncle said, after I had recounted to him my two years’ experiences:

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Woodward was minister over a little church of mill people, one of those underpaid[194] men who not only preach faith but express it in many kindly but unheralded services to society. He obtained congenial work for overworked factory girls, sent tired mothers into the country in the summer season, sent invalids to hospitals, inspired mill lads in self-culture, and kept his own busy mind furnished with the latest and most scholarly information in social science and theology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[197]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Mr. Woodward put his hand into his[198] pocket and brought out from thence a cluster of crinkling bills.

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

He counted into my hand fifty dollars and said,

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

I led Mr. Blake to the Point Road, the peninsula which juts out like a forefinger from the south end of New Bedford into Buzzard’s Bay. We walked along the grassy foot-path, near the low wall, past the shimmering sea, the flying, croaking gulls, and a parade of scallop boats. My companion had a very ambitious moustache which was trying hard to mature, and he had a trick of unconsciously aiding the ends by pulling them as he talked. While he interjected theological shop talk, and had a long dissertation on Textual Criticism versus Literal Inspiration, when he found that I had been in such a conservative theological atmosphere as Evangelical University, and though he prattled familiarly the names of Renan, Weissmann, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl, I found inspiration in the man himself, for I kept thinking to myself on that walk, “He has attained to what[199] you are after.” We came to a grove of spruces that had grown on the edge of some rocks by the side of the road. Here, a quartet of blue-bloused Chinamen were celebrating some sort of a holiday by playing strident tunes on queer pipes and tom-toms, joining in with their falsetto voices. Mr. Blake and I found a secure place on some ledges, from which we could throw pebbles at the white gulls that walked up and down the beach in lady-like fashion.

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

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

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

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

My aunt wanted to know what sort of a lunatic I was to borrow money on which to get an[200] education. Her theory yet remained, that only those with large fortunes were entitled to an education.

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

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

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

When the glistening negro, in spotless white, rushed through the cabin, waving a pink-bordered towel and muttering to the ceiling or to the thick carpet, as if it were no concern of his, that this was “the last call for dinner,” I[201] felt that I would adventure into the considerable menu a dollar would bring me, if for nothing else but to atone for those hungry days of three-cent meals in Indianapolis and Buffalo!

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

The steamboat wharf was the front porch to a large city which began at the summit of a hill to the south, crowded the hillside, wandered into the valley, and ascended another hill and continued on it as far as the eye could reach. I walked over the cobbled street in front of the wharf shed, made my way past long rows of[202] cordage and commercial houses, and came out into a triangular market-place, shut in by low-set brick and wooden houses, cheap hotels, fruit, fish, and sailors’ clothing stores. The market-place was thronged with wagons and stalls. In one section the hay wagons were massed and over them groups of stablemen and citizens argued until load after load had been sold. In another section, with their backs forming an aisle through which I walked, were the butcher-carts offering roasts, strings of sausage, coral strings of frankfurts, and whole sides of pork. Back of them were the vegetable carts with loads of squashes fresh from the fields and heaps of greens. After walking through this noisy market, I came to the main business street of the city, lined with stores and humming with cars. Then I walked up a hill past residences and dying grass lawns, until, in a triangular fence which followed the parting of two streets, I had my first view of the theological seminary.

The seminary was separated from the modern houses about it not only by the fence, but also by its age, its soberness, its shaded walks, and its ample stretches of lawn. Behind the leaves of the trees I saw one of those mill-like dormitories which our stern, eighteenth-century forefathers loved to build when they planned colleges and seminaries. The whole aspect of the place, as I entered the gate, was one of monkish[203] repose, of academic sedateness. The drab paint on the porches of the dormitory and covering the professors’ houses, the dignified layers of brick in the chapel, all said, as plainly as you please, “Don’t laugh here!” All my early dreams concerning how colleges and places of learning should look, were realized. The very bricks in the buildings seemed to be after a theological education.

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

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

[204]

## Chapter XXII. Stoves with
Traditions, Domestic Habits, and
Greek, “Boys Will be Boys”

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

The parlor stoves, coal-hods, water bowls, and pitchers, the personal possessions of the students, were handed down from class to class, in many instances, until the most trivial price—say[205] a dollar for a six-foot stove—gave a profit of ten cents and three years’ use to the senior who sold out. The stove I purchased for two dollars was a giant of a stove, high, bulky, and lavishly decorated with ring-a-rosy cherubs, covered with a thick coating of stove polish until they had ceased being an angelic silver and had become an Ethiopian black. I mention this stove because its sheet-tin girth was hallowed by hoary traditions, and if it could have spoken it would have kept me cheered for many hours by a recital of the different escapades in which it had figured at the hands of the theologues. The rust on its bands, for instance, was due to the fact that some students had plastered it with a swaddling of sticky fly paper. The dent immediately under the hood had been made by a flying theological treatise which had been aimed originally at the head of an intruder, who insisted on keeping one of the stove’s former owners from a study of Hebrew nouns. The broken foot, which rested on some thin wafers of wood, was caused by the attempt on the part of some students to reverse the stove during the absence of another owner who was paying court to one of the young women in the city.

We attended to the dusting and care of our own rooms with more or less thoroughness. Some of my friends chose to sleep and study amidst dust and disorder rather than to endure[206] the strain and toil of a sweeper, a beater, and a duster for a Saturday morning. When we went to a city prayer-meeting or a lecture, we would usually dangle our greasy kerosene cans as far as the corner grocery and leave them to be filled. In fact, so inextricably interwoven with our intellectual concerns were our domestic habits, that I had not been in the dormitory very long before I caught myself entering my Greek class holding fast to a coal-hod, which I had taken the trouble to carry along the walk and into the recitation building, while I had unconsciously propped my Greek Testament very snugly behind the lower banister, under the impression that it had been the coal-hod.

One Saturday morning, Providence or Fate—whatever it would be at a theological seminary—arranged a mise en scène which called attention, in an effective way, to the inconvenience of permitting the students the use of coal-hods and wash bowls. The President was entertaining a gentleman who had been the first donor to our new and splendid gymnasium. He had escorted the benefactor through the bathrooms, the bowling-alleys, over the running-track, and had taken him among the equipment, with evidences of great pleasure. I had occasion to be leaving the gymnasium in their wake. I saw the President throw open the door which led into the lower hall of the dormitory and heard him say, “This is our dormitory—” or something to[207] that effect, and he stepped back to allow the seminary benefactor to precede him into the dignified precincts of our domicile. Then he followed, and one may imagine how he must have felt, as he gazed upon a chaos of coal, of wood, of water, and of broken crockery, which lay like the trail of a sloven over the hall and over the first flight of steps; echoes from the preceding night, when the top floor had engaged the lower floors in a counter demonstration of noise, smash, and confusion.

[208]

## Chapter XXIII. A Plot Which
had for its End the Raising up of
a Discouraged Young Preacher

ONE day I was sitting in the apparently deserted library, looking over the new books which were always kept on a side shelf, at the entrance to one of the alcoves, when I heard a heavy, most disconsolate sigh, coming from a hidden corner in the rear of the room. The sigh was followed by the rustling of book leaves. I continued my investigation of the new books, but was once more interrupted by that same, prolonged sighing. It was just such a sigh as Dante must have heard proceeding from the lips of those unfortunate creatures who stood in neither hope nor despair. I decided to investigate, and, for that purpose, went down the alcove from which the sighing seemed to have come, and there, with his back turned to me, seated at one of the reference tables, with his head resting woefully on his spread out arms, sat Amos Tucker, an upper-classman.

I hesitated to approach him, at first, and pretended[209] that I had come into the alcove for a book. Then again the sigh proceeded from the limp heap at the table, and, throwing all restraint to the winds, I went to the table, touched Amos on the shoulder, and said,

“Are you in trouble, Tucker?”

He raised his tearful, grey eyes to me, and said,

“They say I’m not fit to be a preacher!”

I sat down beside him, for from his manner I knew that he welcomed me to be his confidant.

“Who says so? Any of the students?” I asked.

“No, it wouldn’t matter if it came from them: the church says so!”

“What church is that, Tucker?”

He sat up in his chair and replied,

“I have just started to preach, this year. I have been out for two Sundays in a little place where they give me seven dollars, out of which I have to pay a dollar and a half for expenses. It’s not that I care a snap about the money, though, but I want a place to call my parish. I feel that I ought to preach. Well, I’ve got a letter from the committee this morning, telling me that they will have to get along without me; that they cannot have me any longer for their minister.”

“What reasons do they offer?”

“That’s it!” he responded, with a catch in his voice, “they have had the bravery to tell[210] me the exact reason. It is this: they tell me—oh, hadn’t you better read for yourself,” and he handed me the last page of a letter, explaining,

“It’s all on that one page: all that you want to know.”

I read:

“You can never make a preacher, we feel—excuse us for telling you so frankly—you have no voice, you do not read well, your grammar is poor, your themes are not interesting. Your last Sunday morning’s talk on ‘Conscience’ was beyond our understanding. Several good supporters have threatened to forego their subscriptions if we have you another Sunday. Will you kindly suggest some one to come to us next Sunday and oblige, yours in Christian sincerity, etc.”

“Blunt, isn’t it?” he half smiled.

“The idea of asking you to send them somebody, after that!” I gasped.

“Oh,” he sniffed, “it’s all in Christian sincerity, you know!”

“Well,” I added, “there are other places, Tucker. Cheer up!”

Then a most discouraging change came into his eyes, he nodded his head, and replied, with vigor,

“The trouble of it is, Priddy, what they say is all true, every word of it! I have a terrible voice and can’t seem to get my words out. I don’t know much about grammar; never had[211] much of a chance on the farm. I’m not quick to learn like so many here. I have to plod and plod and plod. As for interesting sermons, why, if they aren’t interesting I do the best I can!”

I wanted to ask him, then, why he persisted in entering the ministry, but I couldn’t find courage to do so, but he had read my thoughts, for he said, immediately,

“You wonder why, if I know all this, I enter the ministry, and fight against hope? Well, I’ll tell you. I have felt, right along, that I might break down my handicaps. At least I thought I would give myself a thorough trial, no matter how bitter the disappointment of failure might be. I didn’t mind losing two or three places at first, if I could finally master myself. It was a sort of inherent vanity of mine that I could succeed. But this—this seems to be a judgment on me, I guess. I think I’ll pack up and go out and become—oh, anything that pays day wages. At least, I can try to be a good layman!”

“Why don’t you try it another year?” I suggested. “Things might turn.”

“How can I stay here if I can’t earn some money by preaching?” he asked. “If no church will take me, why, I shall have to leave the Seminary.”

“I wouldn’t leave before having a good talk with some of the professors,” I suggested. “I[212] think you have the sort of a spirit which will finally prevail, Tucker.”

“Oh,” he replied, “I haven’t got much spirit—now—after that letter. They might have borne with me a month or two longer—perhaps I should have surprised them.” Then he laughed, bitterly. “You can’t guess why I came into the library with my troubles, Priddy, can you?”

“No.”

“You see this!” and he indicated a large, open book, on which his tears had been falling. It was a huge, ancient tome, with metal bands and chipped leather binding. The leaves were yellowed, and from them came a dampish odor of musty age. It was a Latin edition of “The Book of Martyrs” opened at the page where the fanciful wood-cut showed heaps of flaming fagots, blazing in Smithfield market, directly under the bare feet of a woman, tied to a stake and holding to her breast a crying infant.

“There is a story about here,” went on Tucker, with a smile, “to the effect that a former student in the Seminary, when discouraged, would come into the library and pore over these dismal, grewsome pictures, and persuade himself that his own sufferings were trivial when compared with the sufferings of these martyrs! I thought I’d come and try it, too, but it only intensified my own misery!” He shut the great book with such an explosion that the dust[213] issued from it and gleamed in the rays of the sun which streamed in through the window.

“But I’d stay on till the end, Tucker,” I persisted. “It’s worth trying—if you feel that you have a call to preach!”

“I have the call clearly enough,” he insisted, evidently cheered by my confidence in him. “If I could only persuade others of it, though, I should feel happier.”

“Probably you’ll have another chance to preach before you expect it,” I said, in conclusion, and left him with the intention of speaking in his behalf to some of the students, who might be able to encourage him in a substantial manner.

I went, quite naturally, to Burner, the upper-classman who had manifested an interest in my arrival. The big student heard my version of Tucker’s experience without comment, and then, after a moment of thought, answered,

“Don’t you bother yourself any further about him. I’ll do all I can. This is an upper-classman’s work, and it needs, too, some fine work by the professors. It wouldn’t take much to drive Tucker off. By the way, don’t mention to him about your conversation with me. I’m sure he’s got the stuff in him for a preacher. He needs practical encouragement and he shall have it. You just watch!”

Two days later, while I was in the gymnasium, practising alone with the basket-ball,[214] Tucker appeared on the floor in his gymnasium clothes, and, apparently, in a very happy frame of mind. As he stood opposite to me and caught the ball as I threw it to him, he said,

“Priddy, I’m going to preach on Sunday; another chance to botch it.”

“Good for you,” I declared. “Where are you to preach?”

“For Burner,” Tucker explained; “he wants a Sunday off. Do you know whether he preaches from manuscript or not, Priddy?”

“I think that he does read—I know he does. I recollect to have heard him declare that it was only by reading that one could get logical sequence: his pet hobby.”

Tucker held the ball in the air for a second and sighed, audibly. “That makes it somewhat easier for me, Priddy. You see, even if I ramble on with notes, so long as I don’t read my sermon word for word, the congregation will give me credit for it, and I may have a chance. Anyway, I mean to keep on, even if I am rebuffed again.”

The following Sunday morning, while Burner was shaving, he said to me,

“I hope that Tucker has a sermon with some logic in it. Anyway, he will get back encouraged. Deacon Herring will see to that!” He turned his face from the glass and smiled at me through the lather.

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

[215]“I have written a letter to my deacon—about Tucker and the tight place he’s in,” explained Burner. “Told him all the facts and asked him to work with us to save a good man for the Lord’s cause. After his sermon, no matter how good or ill it is, Deacon Herring will go up to Tucker with a radiant face, tell him how glad they are to have him along, and invite him to preach the following Sunday. Meanwhile the deacon will forward to me a carefully written, frank criticism of Tucker, from which we can diagnose his troubles, fairly, and then get some of the professors to work on his case. Oh,” and Burner’s face was gleaming, “I guess if there’s any good points under Tucker’s skin, we’ll uncover them!”

It was an unusual edition of Tucker who returned the following day. I walked with him, arm in arm over to the Commons.

“There, Priddy,” he chattered, “at last I’ve found somebody who thinks I’m called to preach. They want me to supply Burner’s pulpit again next Sunday! He’s to have another day off. Tired, he told me. That’s the best sort of appreciation, isn’t it?” he added.

Burner said nothing to me or any one else about the personal sacrifice he made in giving up two Sundays to the discouraged Tucker, but I knew that the money he gave up was much needed. Burner, meanwhile, received the diagnosis from his deacon, and reported[216] matters to one of the professors to whom Tucker looked with great reverence and respect. The result of this came out in a diplomatic invitation, sent by the professor, for Tucker to come and have a talk about his affairs—a perfectly natural request for the professor to make.

It did not take the professor long—armed as he was by Burner’s report-to get from Tucker a statement of his situation. Finally, the professor set himself to work, not only on the written sermons of Tucker, but also on his enunciation, his gestures, and his habits of thought.

“The professor’s helping me wonderfully,” exclaimed Tucker to me one day, as we took a walk into the outskirts of the city. “He’s landed ker-plunk on my worst faults, just as if he could read me like a book. You’d laugh at the sort of mournful stuff I’ve been giving from the pulpit! It’s quite plain to me now. I’ve been too depressing. That’s been one thing. No wonder the people didn’t want some of the stuff I’ve been guilty of giving. It’s optimism they want, Priddy, optimism! The professor’s proved that, all right! Just you wait till next Sunday, when I preach for Burner. I’m to have a sermon, entitled, ‘Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice!’”

“What have you been preaching on, Tucker?” I asked.

He smiled, as one who could afford now to smile at past faults.

[217]“Judgment, and Conscience, and the Inheritance of Penalty, and such-like,” he said. “Heavy, eh?”

“I’ve no doubt you had some good ideas on those subjects, Tucker, though, as you say, they are a trifle doleful, one after the other.”

“Got thinking in a groove, Priddy, that’s what the professor thought. But, of course, I’ve other faults. I don’t speak up—just whisper: no life or action. But,” he went on with a confidential smile, “I’m working hard on that, too. Mean to brighten up on those things next Sunday; though reformation can’t come in a day or a week.”

The next Monday a most encouraging report came to Burner from his deacon. Among other things, the old man said in his letter,

“There were not many out to hear him, for they had not cared for his preaching of the previous Sunday: but to those of us who had heard him the first time, his second appearance was startling. First of all, he seemed to have confidence. That was the striking thing. Then, in his effort to make himself heard he kept on a high-pitched note, which was somewhat monotonous, but more effective than his former timid whispering as if he were afraid of bursting the ear-drum of a gnat which sat on his desk. He fanned the air like a windmill in an effort to remedy lack of action: but that was a good sign. It argues well for the young[218] man when he gets on the middle ground. But his sermon! He really gave us a cheering word; that made most of the others, who were there, like him. Personally, he would be glad to know in what a different way I have taken the application of his sermon, to ‘rejoice, and again—rejoice.’ I wish him the best of success. There is hope for him. I am getting one or two people, who told me they like what he had to say about rejoicing, to write notes of appreciation to him.”

“Twenty dollars well spent!” concluded Burner, with a smile. “At the rate, he is going Tucker will have a church of his own, over which he will cast his blessing. He has confidence—now!”

Late in the spring, Tucker found himself enjoying somewhat of a local reputation among us, for he was a decided success, by that time, on his preaching expeditions. He said to me,

“Priddy, the other people think I’ve got a call—now. I had a narrow escape, didn’t I?”

[219]

## Chapter XXIV. Burner, a
Searcher After Truth. How a
May-Pole Subdued a Tribe of
Little Savages

BURNER, the upper-classman, though not my roommate, and by his upper-class privileges under no sentimental obligations to me, became my constant companion. He was a tall, thick-set man with a very heavy black moustache, much older than myself and dominated by a very heavy but sincere temperament. He had been a real estate agent and a country auctioneer up to his thirtieth birthday. Then he had studied for three years, privately, with a high-school principal, and later he had come to the Seminary to put himself under training for the ministry.

Burner almost frightened me by his hunger and thirst after knowledge, for in him I looked upon the epic grandeur of a mind, long starved, completely awake. All the outstanding, amazing, bewildering intellectual problems of the[220] Universe and God, had solutions which Burner, with a sense of his limitations, sought to master. I had seen students of books before, prize scholars, in Evangelical University, but I had never beheld the workings of an awakened, mature mind. Books and the teachings of the masters were merely the starting points, the paths of departure, for Burner. He sought his path to God and God’s mind by his own charts. He was his own authority in thought, an independent ship under full sail exploring unmapped territory. He would sit in his Morris chair, in a secluded corner of his room, with his bony fingers propping up his gaunt chin, and with blazing eyes try to think out, in his own words, from a synthesis of his own observations, why God permitted evil. One night he rushed into my room with almost fanatical eagerness and compelled me to listen while, from a newspaper item which told of a father who had given some of his blood to his sickly child, he gave an eloquent theory of the Divine Fatherhood, suggested by that analogy. All his studies, in language, science, and philosophy were focussed upon his thought of God. They were not merely a discipline, or parts of a necessary curriculum, but the means to an end, the roads over which he went to a completer knowledge of his faith. The most unrelated and even trivial items of truth aroused his mind to action and set him at work on the most intricate and abstruse doctrines.[221] He was critical down to the fine points of sharpening a pencil: he was intolerant of those who got their conclusions from text books.

“I’m doing my own thinking,” was his favorite sentence, “basing it on careful reading and minute information and nearly always I find that I get conclusions, after hard thought, that I might have secured, second-hand, from books. But oh, Priddy, what a treat it is to be in the Seminary, filling in the mind after it has been starved all these years!”

“It must be a tremendous inspiration to you, Burner,” I said, “you seem to enjoy it so!”

“Enjoy it!” he gasped. “I revel in it! Just think how blank my mind was when I came here! I thought they wouldn’t take me. I had never been to college, and had little preparation. When they did take me and give me my chance, I resolved to make up for lost time, Priddy. Other seminaries would have refused me, and I should never have gone into the ministry. Of course it is the biggest inspiration that has ever come to me. It is my first real chance!”

I soon learned that I had found in the East what I had found in Evangelical University, a professional school that was willing to bend to the service of the ambitious but unprepared student. But in the Seminary there was more point and breadth to the teaching; the studies were more thorough, intellectually more[222] satisfying; so, with Burner and with many others who, like myself, had never been to college, I began the exciting adventure into disciplined truth.

It was rich fare to which I was invited, during that first year: the tough meat, Hebrew, which even moderately digested, meant exegetical strength in Old Testament lore, the tenderer portions of Greek which nourished one’s New Testament appetite; entrées of psychology and philosophy; well-baked and spiced Church history, and a various dessert of special lectures comprising every viand from the art of preaching to nerve-stirring appreciations of social movements.

The social life of Evangelical University had been so narrow that I was ready to appreciate the broadness of that permitted us in the Seminary. The professors had us in their homes for teas and dinners. The intimate touch between us and our teachers formed part of the discipline of those years. There was hardly any sign of that academic aloofness which I had always supposed to be characteristic of eastern institutions. I ran into the room of a sick classmate one Saturday morning, only to find him being nursed by the professor of theology. The utmost freedom of thought was given us in the speculations of the classrooms. It was an atmosphere where bigotry and dogmatism could not live overnight. Our lives, by being[223] linked to that of the Seminary, began to be linked to the life of the city; for the churches and the people showed us many thoughtful courtesies, took us into their circles, and made many winter evenings merry and profitable.

I still had to rely upon my own efforts for money, but the days of loading brick, raking lawns, making furnace fires, were gone now, and I was enabled to earn money in a more professional way. I was given the task of organizing some children for one of the smaller churches of the city. One hundred of them met me on Sunday afternoons, in the body of the church, where for an hour we tried to get along harmoniously together and incidentally learn some concrete definitions of the Kingdom of God. I tried to preach through pictures on a blackboard and through objects like keys and nails, knives and flowers. Many of the little ones were not used to church etiquette, so I had to wander away from the Kingdom of God many times to instruct some of them concerning the necessity of taking off caps in church, of the inhumanity of pulling one another’s hair braids, of the injudiciousness of poking pins in one another’s necks. Often, too, when the neighborhood, after a Sunday feast of mutton and peas, was enjoying its mid-afternoon slumbers, some of the boys would whirl the church bell and make startled men and women imagine it was the fourth alarm of a[224] fire. I had to correct that practise. We held several socials during the year, socials of a unique character. My assistants would keep the door locked in the little chapel until the oil lamps had been lifted out of danger. The popcorn and candy would be put on tables in heaps and the signal of admission given. Into the room the horde of yelling, scrambling children would come and fill it with all manner of wild romping. The refreshments would be given, there would follow another wild frolic, and at half-past eight the children would go home persuaded that they had had “a dandy time! Three helpings of popcorn and all the lemonade you could drink!”

When the first of May arrived, I announced a picnic for the children, and though the day was cold, more than our actual membership appeared—with individual lunches. When we arrived at the grove I had to stand guard over the lunches until the noon hour. Then, after an afternoon of disordered fun and fight, I managed to secure order on the way home by permitting the children to hold the ribbons of the May-pole and to trail behind in orderly procession, singing, as we entered the residential section of the city, very piously and earnestly, “Onward, Christian Soldiers!”

Meanwhile the arched elms on the seminary campus leafed out and shaded the walks with cool shadows. The students met after supper,[225] threw off their coats, and played ball until darkness. The robins began to perch on my bedroom window ledge and waken me by their dulcet flutings long before breakfast. The fumes of burning leaves came through the open windows from the campus. It was spring and it was graduation time for the seniors.

It was the season of the year when at Evangelical University the students, like Thropper, would be planning to earn money during the coming vacation by taking subscriptions for “The Devil in Society” and similar objects; but my summer was to be one full of inspirational and serviceable possibilities. It had been arranged for me, by the seminary president, that I should take two schoolhouses in a far-away district and preach during the long vacation. At last I was to actually enter upon my chosen profession.

[226]

## Chapter XXV. At the Heart
of Human Nature. A Confidential
Walk with a Dollar Bill at
the End of it. A Philosophical Observation
from the Stage-Driver

A FOUR hours’ journey by train, each minute going farther and farther away from thickly settled country, and then I found myself waiting on a depot platform for the stage-driver who was to conduct me to Upper and Lower Village, twelve miles from the railroad.

I looked around and when my eyes lighted on a wooden-legged man, seated on the front seat of a democrat wagon, I knew that I had found the conveyance. I went over to him and said,

“Are you going to Upper and Lower Village?”

He aimed some colored expectoration over his horse’s ear, watched it alight upon a fluttering piece of paper, and then, satisfied with his marksmanship, he said, gruffly,

[227]“Ef you’re th’ Elder, why, I got a seat. Jump in!”

The day was excessively hot, and we sat under the full glare of the sun. We left the little railroad village and plunged on through the churned-up swirls of choking dust straight into the isolation of this world, into a part of New England where whole townships have not even yet attained unto the dignity of names, but like prisoners with their suffrage taken from them, must be known by mere numbers.

The forests had been leveled, and there were innumerable acres of deforested land covered with rusty branches which had been left after the choppers had trimmed the logs. After several miles, we came to wide stretches of plain, covered with blueberry bushes.

A dip in the road, and we had plowed through the last inch of dust: the wheels of the democrat rattled merrily over the stone road of Lower Village. Word had been telephoned from the first farm we had passed that “the new Elder was on the stage with Bill.” The women boldly stood at their doors watching; from behind many windows I saw intent faces engaged in taking a comprehensive glance at me. I maintained a stolid attitude, and pretended not to be aware of the intense and continuous surveillance to which I was subjected. We thundered over a wooden bridge, went up a steep hill, and drew rein at a long veranda,[228] which “Bill” informed me was the “Office, whar you git down.”

A tall, timid octogenarian, in shirtsleeves, whose thick trousers were drawn up tightly above soil-daubed shoes, introduced himself as “the deacon” and conducted me to a little house down a lane which ended in a pasture. The hot air of the day was fragrant with the odor of sweet-smelling foliage. Crows were screaming in the distance over the tops of some burnt pines. A woman, tall and thin and pale, welcomed me with all the hospitality with which a mother would welcome a son. I knew from that moment that I had a pleasant summer before me.

The two villages were nothing more than single rows of houses on either side of a main road. That road went inland for miles and miles through immeasurable solitudes, where no man dwelt. We were at the end of the world, apparently.

Then began my missionary experience. I was passed from home to home, sometimes staying but three days in one place: the object being both economical and social. The cost of my board, under this arrangement, was very light on each household, and as each hostess was not satisfied unless she gave the “Elder” the very best cooking she could produce, my short stay did not permit any embarrassment to the menu. But more especially this arrangement[229] made it possible for me to know nearly every family in my parishes intimately, as the association with the families at the table was the means of establishing more than a perfunctory friendship. They learned some of my shortcomings, and I was made aware of their needs. When, in the latter part of the summer, I was boarding in Upper Village, in the shadow of the mountain, and went down to Lower Village for a Wednesday evening meeting, one of the households expected me to creep into the house with the eldest son, go into the pantry and “steal” huge slices of blueberry cake. This done, the husband and wife would come into the kitchen, have a hearty laugh, and before I started back for my boarding-place, we would have our serious talk over matters of faith and life.

There were few well-to-do farmers in the community. The distance was too great from the railroads for the injection of much social life. The winters were filled with days when life was grim. Had it not been for the telephone and the mail, the life of that back-road would have been without any great attractions. But the very isolation of the villages, and the absence of many social opportunities through the winter, like a church and preaching, made these farmers the prey of traveling fanatics, who imported here and there the most fanciful conceptions of religion and sought, by all manner[230] of persuasion, to turn people into Mormons and “New Lights,” “Holy Ghosters” and “Disciples.” It did not take long to see that some of these perversions had taken root in some homes, and I found myself having to attempt the feat of constructing a positive and less fanatical doctrine: a feat which at the time I did poorly enough, but which I took pleasure in attempting. But it was not formal doctrine or intellectual discriminations which those parishes needed as much as it was a social man, to impart into their midst, after the austere winter, a joke, a song, a story, and a friendly hand-clasp. If I had preached no sermon, but merely gone from home to home, from field to field, telling men and women and children that I was their friend, I believe that I should have accomplished the major part of the needed ministry.

The meetings were held in the upper rooms of two very solidly constructed schoolhouses four miles apart. Our meetings had to be announced in two kinds of time, for some set their clocks by the sun, while others set them by the Standard, sent over the telephone wires. The dim, chalky atmosphere of the rooms was always colored by rich green ferns and assortments of wild flowers. Even though the flowers were bunched in the necks of mustard bottles, tumblers, and cream jugs, and not always arranged according to Japanese art,[231] yet the thought that the sense of beauty in religion found expression even in wild flowers apologized for all else. When the hob-nailed boot and the plow, year in and out, are uprooting and crushing field flowers, it marks the high tide of esthetic appreciation when the wearers of the hob-nailed boot and guiders of the plow take pains to pick those flowers and add them to their hymns, their prayers, and sermons in praise to God.

No small, narrow opportunity was mine, such as in my gloomier moments I had ascribed to a country pastor. Preaching a sermon formed but a fraction of my duty. There were young men and women who sought advice about the outside world, and their business chances in it. There were business colleges, academies, hospitals, and mills to propose to the restless ones, who, like young birds, were to try life on their own wings.

Entwined in the pastoral work, were many social pleasures that made my body strong and rested my nerves: adventures over the high hills for soul-subduing vistas of mountains and lakes; trout fries by the side of meadow brooks; picnics by the river; visits to bark-peeling camps, over corduroy roads, and encampment on a lake shore where at night the wild birds gave voice and were interpreted to us by a guide.

The golden-rod lined the dusty road at last, and the purple flowers took the place of the[232] lighter summer ones, and it was time for me to return to the Seminary. The services were crowded that last Sunday; mothers brought their babies and did not care if the little ones did compete with me, in voice. I knew what was in the faces, as they looked intently on me, as I preached. They were thinking that this would probably be the last preaching they would hear until the following summer, unless some stray, itinerant evangelist strolled that way and opened up the schoolhouse for an evening. There were many tearful farewells, and then the people went out into the night. It was a clear night of stars and chill. As I left the schoolhouse, having bade good-bye to the janitor, for I was due to leave on the next morning’s stage, a young farmer stepped out from the deep shadow of an oak near the flag-staff and accosted me with,

“Say, Elder, do you care to go up the road a piece?”

I responded that I should enjoy a walk and a chat with him.

While we walked between two walls of trees, our way dimly outlined by the faint flicker of the stars, my friend said,

“I’m one of the bashful sort, Elder. You know that; but I didn’t want you to leave without having me tell you how much you have helped my folks this summer. The time you come in our house and played and sang at the[233] organ for us, and cheered us up with a laugh, why it made things different in our house. Since mother died, we’ve been having a hard row to hoe, and you don’t know how much we’ve appreciated the cheering up you give us. It gets terrible lonesome out here through the winter, and I want to thank you for all that you’ve done!”

We took a long walk through the night, paying no attention to distance; but sharing confidences in true brotherly fashion. Then we turned about and when we came to the crossroad, in front of the schoolhouse, we clasped hands, and as he hurried, without another word, into the darkness towards his motherless home, I felt something crisp in the palm of my hand. When I returned to my room and had a light I found that he had given me a dollar bill for a thank offering.

The next morning I had my baggage on the stage, this time for a return. Bill, with his wooden leg, greeted me, for by this time we were old friends. The word of parting was given at the post-office, and the democrat rattled down the grade and over the bridge. This time a continuous flutter of handkerchiefs and aprons, and a continuous hearty shout from the men and boys, followed our passage through the two villages and then we drove into the dusk of the road through the blueberry barrens, Bill aiming expectoration at every soap sign[234] within reach, and confiding in me, on the way, the fact that he had loved once and “lost,” which he seemed to take in a very philosophical mood, for he concluded with this phrase, “You can’t get the hang of wimmen, anyhow!”

[235]

## Chapter XXVI. The Strange
Adventure of Burner into Nothing,
and How my Own Mind Got into
Trouble, and How my Faith was
Strengthened under the Chapel
Window

ON my return to the Seminary I found Burner in the throes of intellectual despair. The big fellow was sitting in his room, half buried in the depths of the green Morris chair, his bony fingers prodded into his working brows.

“What’s wrong, Burner?” I demanded.

“I’ve been thinking back too far,” announced the serious fellow.

“Thinking back too far?” I gasped.

“Yes,” he muttered. “I’ve nothing to stand on, now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve thought away all substance—now!” he moaned, in despair. “I can’t even conceive a God!”

“Burner!”

[236]“Horrible, isn’t it, Priddy?”

“What do you mean—explain, so that I can get this thing by its head,” I suggested.

Burner seriously gathered himself together in his chair, sipped from a glass of water, and then began,

“Probably I do too much thinking; maybe that’s what’s the matter, Priddy. When I left here, last June, and went out for the summer, I began to try to think through substance; I thought I might do it, sometime. I got to thinking about it, when I took my walks over the hills, and kept thinking about it, but, somehow, I couldn’t get my thought back of the material. When I got back here, last week, I was sitting in this chair, when all of a sudden I did think back of God; and conceived all reality as being so immaterial that nothing exists: no, nothing!” he shouted, “not even—God!”

“Can’t you think back again—to him?” I demanded, making an effort to be of some assistance and comfort to the disconsolate man.

Burner stood on his feet, and paced the floor, excitedly, and said as he gestured with his hands,

“I’ve got to be honest—with truth, no matter how far it leads me!”

“Yes!”

“Just think how horrible it is; I’ve thought back till I’ve struck nothing—nothing!”

[237]“Come, it’s not so bad as that, Burner, is it?”

“I shan’t be able to preach, to study, to believe anything!” he declared. “How can I when there is nothing to preach, to study, or to believe?”

I could not conceive a more pathetic restraint on a man who sought to get his living by preaching and study.

“Perhaps some of the professors might help you back—at least as far as a belief in God,” I suggested, timidly.

“Oh, if I only could get back there,” he pleaded, “I would pray about the matter, but I can’t pray to nothing, can I?”

I began then to realize how much a dilemma a philosophical honesty could create.

“You are too serious, Burner,” I proposed. “You ought to take some things for granted; not seek to explain everything, you know.”

He looked at me through astonished eyes,

“I will take nothing for granted that cannot bear the test of logic!”

“There,” I cried exultantly, “your intellectual adventures have brought you into German Rationalism: that’s just what’s the matter with you, Burner. You’re not the first one that has been caught. It is a passing experience. Keep on thinking, old fellow, you’ll come back after a time. It looks serious now, but it’s only a phase. Read the biographies of some of the[238] saints; it will help you back to a positive faith, I’m sure.”

So I left him with that comfort, hoping that he would not leave the Seminary in his intellectual excitement, for I felt sure that his Rationalism or Agnosticism or whatever form of mind he was in, would pass and give way to something with more color and inspiration in it.

Our studies for the second year were more practical and philosophical than those we received during the first year. I was ready to appreciate the value of the studies more after my summer’s experience as a missionary. The intellectual honesty and sincerity of Burner was indicative of the spirit which one of the professors, who later left us, engendered in us. One incident will illustrate the temper of his art of teaching. Our class, in its first year, had approached this man’s recitation with a feeling of fear, for his astute mind and his impassive manner in the classroom, and withal, his absolute fearlessness in bringing up the other side of an affirmative, had not reacted in his favor. Even before we knew him, we had him placarded, in our minds, as an unbeliever! One day when we came into his class we found that some one had written on the blackboard, the professor’s name with this legend after it:

“Professor —— Atheist!”

When he came into the classroom, and saw that, I thought he would burst into tears; a look of[239] patient wonder came into his eyes, and he merely said to me,

“Mr. Priddy, will you kindly take the eraser and give us a clean blackboard!”

Our first class under this teacher was one in psychology. We met and his first question was,

“What are we to study?”

Instantly one of my classmates replied,

“Psychology!”

“What is psychology?”

My classmate, who had read the definition in the day’s lesson replied, confidently,

“‘The study of the mind and the processes of the mind,’ sir.”

“Ah, and what do you mean by the mind? What do you know about the mind? Have you ever seen one?”

My classmate stammered,

“Why—eh, no, sir.”

“Then perhaps some one else will inform me what we are here for?”

No one was willing.

“Then you will return to your rooms, gentlemen,” said the professor, without a trace of a smile, “and come tomorrow at the same hour and tell us what we are to study during the year. I really must know. We cannot get along until I do.”

The next day, some of us met, before the class and conspired to teach that professor his lesson.[240] We memorized the definitions and the explanations so that it would be impossible for us to slip. Then we entered the classroom.

“What are we here for, gentlemen?” began the professor.

Instantly the answer came from the corner,

“To study psychology, sir.”

“Will any one tell me what is meant by psychology?”

“‘A study of the mind and the processes of the mind, as such,’” responded another student.

“‘As such.’ What is meant by that, sir?”

One of my classmates undertook to explain that “as such” meant that the “states of the mind” were to be studied as “states of the mind,” and not as—eh—

“Mince pies?” asked the professor, with a slight, serious elevation of his eyebrows.

For the next five minutes he went around the class involving each one of us in our own ignorance until it was impossible for him to get a reply to any one of his questions.

“Too bad,” he muttered, seriously. “I really don’t see how we are to get on. This won’t do. You had better go back to your rooms and come tomorrow and see if we can let in any daylight on this matter. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

We resolved that we would not study a single word for the morrow; but that we would go into the class and have no information to offer. We would see how the professor would like that!

[241]The following afternoon, pursuant to this plan, when the professor had greeted us, his first question was,

“What are we to study? Can any one tell me?” It brought no response.

He looked around the room in great astonishment and went from man to man, asking,

“Can you tell me?” and each time getting a decided and belligerent negative.

Then a smile of satisfaction lighted up his sober face and he said,

“There, gentlemen. Now that you have made up your minds that you know nothing about psychology, I am ready to begin to teach you!” and from then to the end of the year we sat under instruction that was masterly, inspiring.

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,[242] 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.

[243]

## 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[244] 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[245] 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[246] 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[247] 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.

[248]

## 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[249] 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[250] 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,[251] 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[252] 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[253] 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[254] 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:

[255]“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.

[256]

## 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[257] 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.

[258]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[259] 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[260] 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,[261] 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[262] 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.

[263]

## 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[264] 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[265] 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:[266] 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[267] 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[268] 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.

[269]

## 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[270] 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!”

[271]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[272] 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,[273] 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[274] 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[275] 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!”

[276]

## 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[277] 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[278] 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!”

[279]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[280] 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[281] 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.

[282]

## 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[283] 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[284] 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[285] 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.[286] 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[287] 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[288] 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[289] 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,[290] 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[291] 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.

[292]

## 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[293] 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[294] 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[295] 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.”

[296]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[297] 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?”

[298]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[299] 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[300] 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[301] 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[302] 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[303] 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,[304] 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[305] 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[306] 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.”

[307]“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.”

[308]“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[309] 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[310] 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[311] 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[312] 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[313] 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[314] 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?”

[315]

## 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[316] 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[317] 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.

[318]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.

[319]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[320] 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[321] 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[322] 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.

[323]

## 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!

[324]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.

[325]“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.

[326]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,[327] 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[328] 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.

“I have been watching your work,” said the professor, kindly, “and think that you might try for the junior essay prize and also for the prize offered for the best piece of college fiction. I have been advising several others in the class to compete, and hope that you will find time for the work. These prize competitions are real tests as to the value of classroom work. I hope you and the others will try!”

On account of the professor’s kindly suggestion, I began to work on the essay and the story, and kept my typewriter clattering hour after hour when not in class. For all the lure of authorship was before me. The lure of substantial prizes. The lure of contest. The lure of doing something, in composition, that seemed real.

When I entered upon this special literary adventure I found that I was part of a considerable fellowship, whose interest in the work was kept alive by the wise, far-seeing, personal interest of our different literary instructors. I[329] found one student who confidentially informed me that he was making a special research in the library concerning some wild, unknown pirates who once infested the New England coast. He meant to write at length upon that subject for the gratification of his own literary curiosity. Another student was busy, like the youthful Stevenson, in imitating, deliberately, the styles of the world-famous authors, and just then, on our first acquaintance, was in the wild morals, but cameo-cut phrases of Maupassant!

By the end of spring, in fact, I found myself in as inspiring a literary atmosphere as, probably, ever an undergraduate experienced. For I had been made a member of the editorial board of the college magazine, and even wrote comic doggerel and attempts at descriptive wit for the now thoroughly established comic monthly. I have been in a magazine board meeting, held in a student’s room, when the conversation would rise into debatable heights, and would excite the whole company, over such questions as:

“Are there more than seven types of plot possible in fiction?”

“Is the supernatural in Shakespere scientific?”

“Was Poe a plagiarist?”

“Will any of the present-day six best sellers become classic?”

Not only did we have these conversations among ourselves, but one of the professors invited a group of us into his home, once a week, where seated in his snug library amid[330] his choice editions, we would take up the technical study of literature, enter into interesting debates about it, and then sit back in our chairs as our generous host rang for the refreshments: a home touch which we appreciated thoroughly.

Another pleasurable surprise was the small number of text books that I found must be purchased. During my first term I bought only two books for seven classes. The professors regarded the college library as a sort of encyclopædic text book for over a thousand students: forming the standard work on history, economics, social science, literature and the various other departments of the curriculum. At last, I found, professors and students had broken loose from artificial authorities and took their history and economics not only from many treatises on the matter, but from current periodicals, the daily newspaper, catalogues, year books and similar vital, first-hand sources.

This method of study, in use throughout the college, made the library something more vivid than a stack of collected books, magazines and pamphlets: it vitalized it and made it the resort of hundreds of students every day. It linked our classroom work, the professors’ lectures and our own studies to hundreds and hundreds of books, periodicals and papers, where otherwise we should have been limited[331] to a half-dozen omnipotent authorities. In place of reading selected Orations from a book of compilations, I was compelled to find the original oration in some yellowed book in which it was first printed. In studying the leading principles of Forensics I had to go to the records of the courts to read the original evidence and pleas in the case. A procedure like that appealed to the mind and made one alert in judgment. It also made the library the centre where the real, serious work of the student was accomplished, and where one could come in daily contact with the fellows who were after serious results during their four years’ residence in the college.

It was in the library that I first made one of my deepest and most valuable college friendships.

It chanced that one of my studies, the life and works of Goethe, took me to a particular section of the reference room where the shelves of Sociology and Economics filled considerable space. As I made my excursions into the section, I became accustomed to the presence of a serious-faced Senior who was constantly occupied with books and periodicals from those two departments. It became natural for us, as the term advanced, to ask one another the time or to borrow pencils or paper. Finally these approaches to intimacy developed into a friendship; into a ripe friendship which included[332] visits to one another’s rooms, long walks, communings in the club-room and ante-class conversations: on all these occasions a true exchange of serious and most profitable confidences taking place.

Thurber, for that was my companion’s name, though the son of a very wealthy father and accustomed to the finer touches of society life, had undergone, in his contact with the college, one of those conscience awakening, ambition refining and ideal lifting experiences which our president informed us, time and time again, should be the final results of a true, college education.

Thurber’s father was one of that type of American men who boast that their success has been attained through self-improvement and self-education and who crystallize their own peculiar and fortunate experience into formal axioms, on which every one else must seek success. Thurber’s father had to his credit at the time a very large textile mill in a textile city in the South and it had been his supreme desire that his son, immediately on quitting High School, should go into the industry, work his way through it, and take charge of it in the end.

But Thurber had no inclination towards lint and the stifling heat of a cotton mill, and he had so informed his father. He also told him that nothing less than four years at a college,[333] where he could meet fellows worth meeting, would please him.

“You can imagine the look my father gave me when I made that proposition, for it knocked to splinters his special pet theories concerning education,” said Thurber. “He stormed about ‘self-made men,’ and quoted Lincoln and some others from the classic list of non-college men: pointed to himself and the huge industry he had created without the aid of a college education, and, in all, gave me to distinctly understand that a college education would spoil a good employer: that it was a waste of time, and that if I was set on going to college, why I could go on my own funds—which I did not have—and be hanged! Of course I was lazy, undecided and youthful: just at the age when all life is a perpetual sunny day. I wanted to come to college to sport around and imagined my doom sealed when father emphatically refused to fund me, but mother—say Priddy, what would the spoiled children of the rich do without generous-hearted mothers?—my mother privately funded me and sent me here and still maintains me, even against father’s orders, for he will not relent and imagines me to be the fool of fools in taking the course I did.”

“The so-called ‘self-made men’ are usually very set men,” I replied.

“Set?” muttered Thurber, “even a vice, tight locked, is loose by comparison with the[334] prejudices my father has against a liberal education. Well, I came this way and started in to sport it and expected to be tutored through my courses by the narrowest passing marks. I spent most of my time either in the fraternity house chugging at a piano or sitting in my room with my feet perched on the table gazing into space. Then I got the—the glimpse, Priddy, and that changed it all.”

“The glimpse, what was that?”

“Well, I can’t exactly define it or locate where it first began, but I do recall that one day, in the classroom—it was in Sociology—the professor set me thinking on a line I had never considered before. I can’t tell what it was that he said explicitly, but he implicitly suggested to my mind that there are such things as dividends-not-of-money. Of course having been used to the other sort of dividends all my life, I was attracted to the idea that there were other dividends. I kept thinking about it and one thing led to another. The president spoke one day, in chapel, of the educated man’s duty to his generation. I linked that to ‘dividends-not-of-money’ and worked it out to my satisfaction that there was for me, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, a place of usefulness and service in the world.”

“You had a call to the ministry, then, Thurber?” I demanded.

“Gracious, no: not that!” he exclaimed, in a[335] tone that implied I had proposed something too extravagant for fancy. “I a clergyman! I respect the cloth, Priddy, and I am glad that you are making it your profession, but really, that’s not my line. Perhaps I’m not cut out for it. I know I’m not.”

“You planned to go into settlement or Y.M.C.A. work, probably,” I hinted, “so many college fellows give themselves to that form of service in these days, Thurber.”

“I know they do, Priddy, but I didn’t work it out in those directions, either, but in a more vital way: one that has aroused every bit of latent enthusiasm for service and helpfulness that might have been hidden away in so pampered a body as mine. It’s what I call the glimpse, Priddy. Want me to explain it?”

“Certainly I do.”

“Well, I really was put in a fix by so much talk in the classrooms from the faculty and in the chapel by the President about ‘moral leadership’ and all that, and really thought at first that they were asking me to go into definite self-sacrificing avocations like settlement work and the other forms of social service, and I had no hankering for that, either. I hated to leave father alone in his old age and wanted, eventually, to succeed him in the ownership and direction of his mills. I imagined myself a callow materialist, opposed to spiritual forms of influence, but I did not want to give up the business.[336] You can probably imagine how heathenish I felt when I contrasted father’s industrial policy with the call to be a social servant. I began to think back to what father’s self-education had done for him and had done for his employees. I faced the truth for the first time: how his narrow-minded policy had brought him great wealth at the expense of his self-respect and the happiness of so many of the people who worked for him. For years and years and years, he had been just paying wages for work done: that was all. He had paid no attention to the moral or social welfare of his people: the hundreds of families under his control. He did not go to their church, attend their lodges, go into their homes, or ever make it his policy to inquire about their welfare. He was just simply using them as tools towards the securing of a fortune—for me, that was all. I saw it all, how he had been creating in his little corner of our American industry, labor hostility, unsanitary conditions, poor types of ignorant, drunken, loafing citizens until the tenements belonging to his firm formed a perfect slum. But he had not the eyes to see, nor has he yet; but he goes on in the darkness and in the groove of his own selfishness, intensifying the disloyalty of his employees and incidentally hurting his own reputation. Yet I could not bring myself to give up desiring to take on that industry. It was right then that the glimpse[337] came.” Thurber paused for a moment and then continued:

“Like the breaking of day, it flashed into my soul one morning in Ethics class, that if I could only go to work in that industry and reform it, that I should be doing a public service: that I should be following the advice of the college and giving moral service. But I realized that I should have to train myself in the science of ethics and morals; the history of economics and the deeper things of social science in order to reform the business intelligently, constructively and profitably to myself and the employees.”

“Oh,” I commented, “you want to make your type of social service earn money?—is not that an unusual sort of social service?”

Thurber smiled and said:

“It does sound worldly, especially to a minister, Priddy, but the strange thing about it is, as I have figured it out, that if I do take an educated, intelligent, thoroughly scientific interest in my employees, and manage to clean up their tenements, their morals and their minds through welfare work, I shall, in the same stroke, be increasing their loyalty to the business, be redoubling their efficiency, be preparing a higher grade of workman: all of which will increase the earnings of my plant.”

“In other words, Thurber, you are going to work on the principle that humanity and welfare work are good business policy?”

[338]“Yes,” nodded Thurber. “If you, as a minister, were phrasing it you would say, ‘Godliness is profitable in all things’—even in good industrial management—to mix in Shakspeare, it is ‘twice blessed, it blesseth him that giveth’—the employer—‘and him that receiveth’—the worker. That’s what I call ‘the glimpse’ and you may imagine how eagerly I am tugging at the strings in order to be working it out practically.”

“But it may turn out to be fine theory: mere dreaming, Thurber?”

“Oh no,” he protested. “Read the countless numbers of sociological works that I have and follow the countless numbers of experiments that have been made in this direction and you will agree that it is the most sane procedure.”

“College has meant something very definite to you, then, Thurber?”

“I should say it had. I tell you I believe I understand, now, the tremendous suggestion that lies behind the college emphasis that its students stand in their businesses and interests against mere commercialism and flood them with intelligent, moral service. Besides, think what significance lies in my studies now: the whole course seems bent to broaden me towards the intelligent, economical use of human beings: psychology will give me trained insight, a course or two in physiology helps me to understand the limits of workingmen’s endurance and wide[339] reading in literature will aid me to intelligently work out a policy of self-culture in the workingmen’s libraries I shall form. Oh, I have come to realize that a business education is a thousand times more than learning bookkeeping, the names of the tools, and a little mathematics from which to compute wages. It demands, in my estimation, the broadest college culture and I mean to secure it.”

“Just the antithesis of your father’s theory,” I suggested.

“Yes, and think, too, how much he has lost by it. You would understand how enthusiastic I am about it, Priddy, if you could have one glimpse of the people and tenements around father’s mill. I feel that right there is my call.”

“I know something about the waste, the riot and the ruin that have followed in the wake of narrow-minded, selfish, uncultured and unsympathetic manufacturers, Thurber. If the college only manages to send out a hundred thousand graduates filled like you with this spirit of humane statesmanship, what a revolution would take place in labor conditions!”

“It would be the front door of God’s kingdom, Priddy,” affirmed Thurber, “sure enough!”

Throughout that year, from the seriousness with which Thurber asked questions in his classes, from the eagerness with which he was ready to talk about welfare work, from the diligence[340] with which he fastened himself to the library alcoves marked: Economics and Sociology, and from the pervading seriousness of his manner, one might easily have guessed that in him one looked on a youth aflame with a consuming, zealous ambition to make his stewardship of men and his college culture yield the highest per cent of moral earnings. I felt proud to call him my friend.

Another of my companions during the senior year was “Quiet” Sanderson, the student who had introduced me to Quarles. “Quiet” was one of those illogical and fanciful appellations in which the students delighted, and was paradoxically twisted from Sanderson’s fluent tendencies.

Sanderson occupied a corner room in one of the newer dormitories. In it was a piano on which he played Beethoven and rag-time with equal ease. The mission bookcase was topped by a very large, felt college streamer and a “perpetual care” sign, which in his Freshman wildness he had taken from a cemetery. As he was a literary man with a pronounced taste for Poe and the French short story writers, there were various evidences of “atmosphere” in the orderings of the room. For instance, some old swords, which might have been discovered in the ruins of Troy, but which, in fact, were clever imitations bought for a song in Boston, hung over the door. A Turkish fez, which Sanderson would wear when company[341] was present, usually hung from the clothes post in a corner of the room, over a quaint, full-length lounging robe made from scarlet cloth and embroidered with Mohammed’s crescent. An oriental scent lingered on those habits of dress; a scent which I have seen Sanderson compound from barks and minerals bought at the druggist’s and of which he would never give me the names. When he held a spread or a meeting of any sort, Sanderson’s room would be thick with the fumes of joss which he kept burning from a blue Chinese bowl. If any one complained, Sanderson would have no scruples in telling the complainant that perhaps the smoke would be even denser and more sulphurous in a later destination!

It was fortunate that I did not catch, like some insidious fever, Sanderson’s habit of procrastination, for while his dreams were in the present tense, real, and vivid, his deeds lingered in the nebulous future. Thus, one night while he lounged on his couch wearing his fez, he informed me that he had the plot of an exciting tale that a publisher might make a fortune by. There was a secret staircase in the first chapter, and between that and the twenty-eighth—a distance of eight thousand words, for he had measured them—enough blood was shed in the numerous duels, alley encounters and small riots with the watch, to stain a miniature Waterloo.

“What are you wasting your time with those[342] blood and thunder yarns for?” I exclaimed, for the utmost frankness was the rule between us.

“Blood and thunder!” he echoed. “Why, it’s thoroughly exciting, whatever you may say about it, Priddy. In my best style, too. Racy, full of tender sentiment at the love passages, and written with an iron pen, whose tip was flaming hot!”

“Let me see this epic of thunder then,” I demanded. “I should like to look it over.”

“Oh,” yawned Sanderson, “I haven’t had time to put it on paper—yet. I have my studies you know!”

Thus it was not only with his literary dreams, but also with his studies. He never seemed to be in his books, but I knew that at some secret hour he must work hard, for his recitations were generally brilliant.

He was a sly fellow, at times, especially when he chanced to be back with work. It was his habit then to get me in his room, when he would yawn and say:

“Priddy, what did the professor conclude about that Lochner fellow?”

Stephen Lochner was one of the Dutch painters we were studying.

I would tell him as well as I could. Then he would drawl:

“Uh, I didn’t follow the professor at all when he said that the early Dutch school, Van Eyck[343] and the others—let’s see, how many were there?”

I would tell him, exactly, with names and dates, and then he would drawl:

“Sure you got them all, Priddy?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I’ll bet you’re grafting the course, Priddy, and haven’t been near the references in the library, eh?”

“Sanderson, I’ve got every note of importance, and have worked up every single picture!”

Then the yawning fellow would turn over to me, lift up his fez in the politest manner and say, with his endearing smile:

“Oh, is that so! Then Priddy, I shan’t need to bother much myself, shall I? You can give me some fine dope on the course!”

Seeing that I was caught, there was no way out of it but to become the unofficial tutor to his lazy highness; a duty, however, which was pleasant enough, for we had so many things in common. There was a sense of embarrassment, however, in the fact that Sanderson would go into the examinations of the course, after I had prompted him, and by some freak of the angel of Providence, his guardian spirit, he would out-top me with marks!

One Monday morning I dropped into his room, on my way across the campus, when he came from his bedroom arrayed in his bath-robe, for he had been oversleeping, and he said to me,

[344]“Congratulations, Priddy!”

“What’s this for?” I exclaimed.

“For the honorable winner of two literary prizes!” he exclaimed.

“Two?” I gasped.

“Yes, and firsts, my friend! I want to get in on the ground floor and get a college ice on the prize money,” he smiled.

“And how do you know this?” I asked.

“The announcements were posted Saturday, after you had left, Priddy.”

“Then you shall have the treat, Sanderson.”

The two prize checks—beautifully decorated with the college seal and ornamental borders—were used to pay for the winter’s supply of wood, at home, and to clear off a store bill. I felt that my first adventure into literature had amply repaid me in fellowships, discipline, and cash: a well-rounded reward.

When I arrived home, for the long summer vacation, I began to ride over the hills to outlying farm-houses in a canvass of fellowship among my parishioners, whom I had never seen in church. My bicycle rides exhausted me in this work, as the summer was excessively hot. Between the village services, on Sundays, I trundled my bicycle up a long hill until I came to a crossroad schoolhouse to which I had invited the isolated people, for services. The people who came to this service would not sing, so that part of the time they were treated to vocal solos by me, to[345] which I had to play my own accompaniment on the little parlor organ I had secured. As my skill on the organ keys was limited to hymns up to the limits of two sharps or as many flats, my repertory, like that of a hand-organ, was easily exhausted. But the people seemed thankful for this interruption of the monotony of their back-road life, and though I never took up an offering or asked them to do anything more than attend the services, which they did with increasing enthusiasm, I knew from their thanks and their faces that it had been a profitable venture, an appreciated service.

But the strain of such a responsibility in addition to my college work was bound to ruin my health, so I resolved that the parish should be free to engage a permanent, resident pastor, and to that end I resigned and sought out a place nearer the college, where I could go through the next year as a pulpit supply and have my wife with me, in my own home, near the college campus.

My new parish, which I visited only on Sundays, was a most delightful village, where an unusual number of interesting people made their homes. Though, at first sight, the village appeared an isolated, sleepy place, yet a plunge into its activities and a catching of its spirit meant the discovery of a number of enterprising, intellectual, and social efforts, of which any large community would have been proud.

[346]There was a village nature club. This club was composed entirely of the townspeople, yet one of the members had been the co-author with a scientist in the study of fresh-water algæ, another member had made an exhaustive study of grasses and minerals in such a scientific manner that his work had received the commendation of the state botanist. The club had expert bird students and a butterfly collector. Another of its members had discovered a rare fern, hitherto never found east of the Mississippi. The members of this club, surrounded as they were by the riches of summer and winter beauty, lived in a glorious world of adventure. When one family drove home, up the long road to its pine groves and isolated farm-house, it counted the varieties of flowers growing by the wayside and made a report of great interest to the other members of the society. Another member watched the stars and gave reports on the newer astronomical happenings.

Then, too, such intellectual interests reacted upon the social life of the little community, and a tennis court for the boys, clubs and sports for the girls, village improvement undertakings, and very interesting and rare lectures through the long winter, were the rule, backed by trained, interested people. This type of community, also, made the church a very desirable and interesting one, and made it easier for me to be away from Sunday to Sunday, for the social[347] concerns were certain to go on under efficient and responsible management.

Meanwhile, my wife and I had brought our little boy to the college town, and had established ourselves in three rooms under the roof of a very tiny cottage. Though we had our dining-table near the kitchen stove and were otherwise crowded almost to discomfort, yet the last year of my educational career meant less anxiety and more inspiration because I could have my home in the midst of it.

[348]

## Chapter XXXVII. Teiresias,
the Blind Prophet, and Squeem,
the Student in the Back-waters of
College Life. A Night of Grim
Fate

ONE winter afternoon as I approached Quarles’ room, to take him for a walk, I heard a loud voice raised in angry altercation, as I thought. I paused on the dormitory stairs, and there came to my ears the blind student’s voice, raised high, as if he were spitting fire. I hurried to his door and entered the room to see what the quarrel between my friend and his enemy could be.

“Priddy, sit down!” quoth Quarles, pausing in his strange heat of jargon. “Listen,” and then, standing in the center of the room, he declaimed this strange-sounding sentence:

“Eipo ti deta kall, in orgitze pleon!” and attended it with a fierce and angry thrust of his fist, as if he were thrusting red-hot bolts down the unwilling throat of a helpless foe.

[349]“Well, of all the strange jumbles, Quarles!” I exclaimed, “what is the baby talk, please?”

“Soo de athlios ge taut oneiditzon, a soi oudeis os ouxi tond oneidiei taxi!” he continued, scowling frightfully and staring with his expressionless eyes as if he would have his stored up wrath break through to flash like fierce lightning on the pride of his unseen opponent.

“Taxi?” I mused, “that means automobile riding at ten dollars a minute—what is the rest?”

“It’s Greek,” he explained, sitting down. “I am the blind Prophet Teiresias, in the Greek drama ‘King Œdipus,’ to be given by the college. Let me translate!”

He sprang to the middle of the floor, and, in English, attended by the same angry gestures, he declaimed to the scoffing King whom he was warning:

“‘Shall I speak something more, to feed thy wrath?’” and then he paused to explain, “and when you called it baby talk, I recited the line which I am to use when the King slanders me for being blind, ‘O miserable reproach, which all who now behold thee, soon shall thunder forth on thee!’ and,” went on Quarles, “you are to know, if you do not know it now, how that later the King does blind himself with hot irons and fulfils the prophecy I hurl at his coward lips!”

“Horrible, it must be!” I shuddered. “What a dark tragedy to lighten a college stage!”

[350]“But,” mused Quarles, “think of the achievement, in these days, when the college critics are charging the college with immersing itself in practical concerns so as to forego the classics. My work is cut out for me, Priddy,” he went on. “If they are to have a real blind man for Teiresias, they must also have fair acting of the lines, for it is all to be given in Greek, not a word of English; for barbarians like you, who will probably be mystified, there will be an English line-for-line translation.”

“Oh,” I retorted, “I have studied some Greek. I have read the New Testament!”

Quarles laughed,

“That is only the introduction to Greek. Listen!”

He stood before me and recited the fluid, rounded, Greek lines of the blind Prophet, as he leaves the King,

“‘Ere I depart, I will declare the word
For which I came, not daunted by thy frown.
Thou hast no power to ruin me.’”

“You will have to have a clear brain for the storing of so much pure, classic speech, Quarles,” I said. “Come out for a walk over the four-mile road with me and you may talk King Œdipus to me till I faint!”

So, arm in arm, over the ruts of the four-mile road, which first took us up a steep hill and then around to the west through some dark, cool woods, the blind student and I walked, and talked of the Greek tragedy in which he was to play so realistic a part.

So Arm in Arm the Blind Student and I Walked

[351]On our way back, as we neared the campus, Quarles said:

“Priddy, have you ever met ‘Squeem’ Hirshey? I’ve got to see him before supper, if you’ll take me to him. He’s one of the old men of the chorus, in the play, and wants me to help him with pronunciation.”

“No, I haven’t met him,” I said.

“A poor Georgian,” explained Quarles, “lives in a stuffy bit of a room with an Irish family, down at The Alley; you know where that is, of course.”

So while we walked in the direction of “Squeem’s” lodging, Quarles gave me full information about this student, one who lived in the back-waters of college life.

“In some unaccountable way,” said Quarles, “Squeem managed to get a decent preparatory education in the South, in a place where most of the people lived in huts. Missionary education, I think. However, he came here, passed entrance exams all right, and was awarded a couple of scholarships that bring him in about a hundred and fifty dollars a year. He tells me that he manages to get enough work to support him: that he earns his room rent with the Gibboneys by doing chores, though what chores such a poor family can have for him to perform, I cannot understand. He cooks his own meals on an[352] oil stove, and, for that purpose tries never to go over seventy-five cents a week for his food. As for clothes, well—he patronizes ‘Eddie’, the old clothes-man, and manages to get cast-off shoes and clothes at ridiculously low prices. A suit for four dollars and a decent pair of shoes, not much worn, for fifty cents!”

“I must have seen him,” I explained, “but of course, I cannot place the name. A queer one, too; reminds one of Dickens’ Squeers, the ugly schoolmaster.”

Quarles smiled.

“That name was tacked on a year ago, when he was a Freshman. It seems that he kept himself to his room and never mixed in things, sort of a timid, bashful chap, but full of energy when it comes to study. A down-at-the-heels fellow, I have heard him called. Well, he was squeamish about everything, and it was natural for the Freshies to tack him with ‘Squeem’ and by that name he will always be known to the future generations of college men.”

“Here’s the alley!” I announced, after a few minutes more of talk. We had passed down an outlying road where, on the very outskirts of the village, stood a row of cheap tenements. Between these, at an angle, lay an alley filled with ashes, tin cans and broken bottles. This alley led up to two ill-looking shanties, so small that by comparison with the houses farther in[353] the town they seemed no more than half-ruined doll houses.

“It’s the blackest house,” whispered my companion. “Go around to the rear. His room is up the back stairs.”

As we rounded the black shanty the sound of gurgling and churning reached our ears, and then, back of a line of flapping, wet clothes, we came on a middle-sized, but excessively gaunt youth, wearing an oil-cloth apron, such as we wore in the chemistry classes when we performed experiments, with a bib that fitted close to his neck. He wore under it a ragged, red sweater, and was churning a washing machine full of clothes, while, at his back, a stout, red-faced Irishwoman was engaged in taking clothes from a basket and hanging them on lines. Hanging from a row of nails on the outside of the house were all shades and colors of students’ laundry bags. Underneath them, wriggling in a broken and dirty clothes basket, lay a six-months-old baby, sucking a soiled thumb and apparently finding it nourishing.

“Hello, Quarles!” greeted the washerman, in great embarrassment at our discovery of him, “I didn’t expect you!” A Southern drawl was evident in his speech. He was about to take off his apron, when the Irishwoman, throwing a frown of dissatisfaction in my direction, growled:

“Mister Hirshey, an’ don’t you be lavin’,[354] mind you. Them things’ve got to be done. You can talk while you work; but work you must, and the young gentlemen can go hang till you’ve time, if they care!”

Squeem’s waxen cheeks, which seemed before to have no signs of blood about them, flushed, and he said, apologetically, as he resumed his churning,

“Only ten minutes more, Quarles. We can talk, and then we can go to the room.”

I was introduced to the student and recognized in him the one whom I had passed on the campus, time and time again in the winter, with his shivering body fitted to ill-measured clothes, and his goose-fleshed wrists and ungloved hands hanging like dead weights from below his coat sleeves.

Ten minutes later, after I had watched the Southerner dip out the dripping mass of laundry and put it through the wringer, we were conducted into the dark kitchen with its odor of cabbage, and ascended by a wabbly stairway to the loft, one half of which was given to Squeems for his abode. A greasy, sour odor of cooking permeated the room. It was lighted by two narrow panes of glass fitted to a makeshift frame, and covered by a curtain of imitation tapestry, with the design of a red Swiss house half buried amid gray bushes and a row of stiff, brown poplars. A cot bed stood in a corner with a bundle of warm quilts in confusion[355] on it, for evidently our host had little skill in his housekeeping. A packing case, on end, with the open side towards us, had been skilfully transformed into book shelf, storage place and desk. A short row of text books was ranged on the packing case. Besides a kitchen chair there was no other seat, save a tin-covered trunk from which Squeem had to take a few dishes, an oil stove and a bread tin,—his dining apparatus,—before it could be utilized for a seat.

The following half hour was spent by Quarles and the Southerner in the pronunciation, the translation, and oratorical interpretation, not only of the chorus part of the play, which would be sung, but of the Blind Prophet’s thrilling lines, which Quarles recited before Squeem with even more spirit than he had to me, for, he explained, as we left the house:

“That poor fellow may be in the back-waters of college, but he’s got a really excellent mind. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him come near to leading his class in scholarship. I like him—that Squeem,” and then my blind companion quoted, with great impressiveness, “‘Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon his throne, a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his ... originality.’”

Then the night of the Greek play arrived in which Quarles and his strange friend were to appear.

[356]My wife and I sat in the gallery, in Assembly Hall, amongst the vast throng of spectators.

A dark, green curtain covered the stage. The white interior of the hall, with soaring ceiling panels, dotted with flaming rows of electric lights, the paintings on the gallery walls of presidents and benefactors of the college, the ushers in evening dress, fine, manly samples of youth, the well-dressed women in their opera costumes: all this was a glorious show to look upon, in itself. But when a group of gowned students took their places, in chairs, near the stage, and were followed by the orchestra, and the musical director,—then the programs fluttered, expectantly, even in the hands of the professors and invited guests from other colleges, who had come to enjoy the literary treat of the much-heralded play.

The leader, with a gentle tap on his rack, brought the musicians into position. A stroke of the wand in the air, and the instruments began with the introductory theme, a droning chant, with wild whisperings in the background, as the violins tried to paint for our senses the chatter of the fierce Fates that were to hound King Œdipus to his horrid death, in payment to their stern laws for his unconscious sin.

Then, as the haunting prelude paused on a wailing minor, as if to tell us that forever and forever man’s despair should continue—under the rule of the Fates, the lights in the hall were[357] darkened, amidst a silence. There was a pause, and then, as the heavy curtains were drawn aside while the drums crashed forth a suggestion of impending strife, we looked upon a marvelous palace front in ancient Boeotian Thebes. Austere gloom, the fluted, pillared doorway with the brazen door bespoke, though the sky was tinted as if for a sunrise, or sunset. Then before our eyes, in that ancient world was unfolded the grim lesson that even unconscious sin must pay at last the uttermost farthing.

Quarles, transformed into a bearded, led prophet, spake his lines with heart-ringing pathos. But as for “Squeem” among the bearded men, who chanted their parrotish gossip, I could not distinguish him.

Heaps on heaps of color were massed on the stage, with a studied effort to inflame the imaginations of the audience. When it seemed that the finest effects of grouping and harmonies of color had been obtained, other actors would suddenly appear and make the splendor of the setting pass belief.

Word by word, gesture by gesture, chant by chant, we followed the dismal but dramatic tale from its air of glory and freedom into the darker shadows of dread which Teiresias foretold. Moods of king and queen, of the old men who stood by the temple, of the priest and the shepherd changed slowly and steadily from scoffing to belief, from belief to alarm, from[358] alarm to fear, from fear to resistance, from resistance to submission, from submission to final reparation. Woven into the shudderings of the old men, witnesses of death and grewsome penalties, were the musical whisperings, to keep our minds upon the unseen spirits of the vengeful gods who were directing the grim tragedy until all the sobs that men and women could give were ended, until the last dreg of a tear remained, and until only the merest whisper of a cry could sound in the chambers of a suffering heart!

We went into the night, from it, feeling that our hearts had been smitten heavy blows, that our life had fastened itself to leaden anchors. The terrible reality, the magnificence of Fate, the classic splendor of sufferings in epic girth had been staged before us.

Teiresias’ words hung in the air, everywhere, even under the dark sky outside:

“O miserable reproach! which shall soon
Thunder forth on thee!”

[359]

## Chapter XXXVIII. How
Ellis, the Captain, Taught me the
Spirit of Contest. I Turn Pamphleteer
on Behalf of Scholarship.
But Find from Garvin that
Scholarship and Education may be
Separate Matters. Account of a
Truly Classic Event, which Makes
the Students Study Color Schemes
and Gives us a Chance to Appear
in Gowns

ONE afternoon I was sitting on the senior fence, watching two fraternity teams wage a contest in baseball, when I saw Ellis, the football captain approaching, with his finger upraised to draw my attention.

Ellis was an impressive fellow with his towering[360] shoulders, oak-like limbs, and ruddy cheeks. In his flannels, tan oxfords, and varsity cap he spelled in large capitals, “Exercise.” For Ellis was known preëminently, in the athletic world, as one of the year’s gods who sit on the pinnacle of Olympus, the revered of freshmen, the applauded of sophomores, and the envied of fellow seniors. By the newspapers he was heralded as the best player of football in his position in all America. His name, through the years of his playing, when he appeared with nose guard and canvas suit, had been on the lips of admiring multitudes. His photographs, showing him catching a football, or in pose for a scramble, had been spread on many city papers that year.

In the college, more than in the outside world, Ellis’ fame had won the highest respect. He was the marked man: marked for friendships, for class honors, and for the respect of the faculty. A freshman, given the merest smile or word by Ellis, immediately ran to his room and wrote a burning letter about it to his mother or his sister. The fraternities and senior societies had vied with one another to secure him for a comrade. He was the college “boss” in a good sense, for if a group of excited students broke the public peace, by an unruly demonstration before the town jail, where one of the students had been immolated for throwing a snowball at the village justice, it was Ellis who[361] jumped on a flour barrel, which he had ordered brought from the back door of a nearby grocery, and at a word, commanded the incipient riot to break up; which it did without a murmur.

“Take a walk, Priddy?” asked Ellis, as he drew near.

“Certainly,” I said, jumping from my perch and measuring my stride to his.

“Priddy,” he said, “you know about the Bristow Oratorical Prize for seniors?”

“Yes.”

“The trials come off soon. Why don’t you go into it?”

“I hadn’t thought of it,” I admitted. “Besides, I don’t think it would be wise. I am no orator; I mean that I do not use finished gestures, and my throat trouble has taken the spirit from my voice. In addition to that, Ellis, when one is used to the pulpit, it is really a different proposition to speak in an exhibition.”

“But you will have a chance with the literary side. That counts one half,” persisted Ellis.

“Now look here,” I smiled, turning on him, suddenly, “why don’t you go into it?”

“I will, Priddy. I certainly will!”

“You’ve made your record in football, and you ought to go into this oratorical contest, Ellis.”

“I’m going into it,” he replied, “not so much for the mere idea of trying for the prize, but for a purpose.”

[362]“What’s that?”

“Well, Priddy,” he continued, seriously, “I’ve been up against it ever since I indulged in sports. It has eaten up much of my time, and there have been days and days when the grind of training and practise and of having to go to bed early, and all that, have been wearing and uninspiring. If it hadn’t been that I felt that I was maintaining the honor of the college by my playing, I should have quit the game long ago. Well, there are a lot of folks that think of college athletics as a waste of the student’s time and as a feature of college life not good in itself, but which must be endured, if men are to be won to college. Of course you know that’s not the truth; at least in this place.”

“Of course it’s not so,” I insisted, just as earnestly. “College sports are the cleanest, most honorable of sports. They teach the students in this college to be manly in losing, to hold their tongues when the visiting team makes a fumble, and to cheer one for the other. It’s so different from the national game, outside of the college, where the crowds in the bleachers throw pop bottles at the umpire, insult the players, and nag one another bitterly. Our college sports teach the students moral control and self-restraint.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Priddy,” agreed Ellis, warmly. “If the game had been otherwise, I would not have wasted my time[363] with it. Well, there are a lot of folks, even in college,” he continued, “who really think that because a man makes good on a football team that he’s not capable with his studies, or with the literary features of the college.”

“There again,” I agreed, “they don’t know all the facts. Think of the fellows on your team, this year. Several of your best players are making excellent records in class work.” I enumerated three of the brightest players who had maintained a rank of over eighty-five, in spite of the great amount of time given to sports.

“Yes, Priddy,” replied Ellis, “that’s so, but the public at large don’t think of it in that way. Well, that is why I want to go into the oratorical contest; just to show folks that a fellow interested in athletics is also able to manifest an interest in literary matters!”

“Good!” I exclaimed, won by his sincere earnestness. “But why do you want me to go in, too, as a competitor? I should think you wouldn’t care to increase the competition, merely as a matter of self-interest.”

“Oh,” he laughed, “the more, the merrier. I thought you ought to go in, too, for I think you would stand a good chance, Priddy.”

Finally I agreed to go in with him. On the walk we advised about subjects and the next day Ellis came to my room for some material I had promised him on his proposed theme.

[364]Then began the strangest preparation for a contest in which I had ever indulged. We conferred with one another about the points we were to make, and prodded one another on, when either became slothful. Finally, when our speeches were memorized, we took afternoon walks into a field where we shaped our orations into some definite spoken form before each other. Ellis would hear me through, suggest how this gesture and that thought might be improved. Then I would criticize him in the same way. We hid nothing from one another, though we were to be rivals on the platform. He knew every turn of my speech and I knew every turn of his. He added force to mine by thinking out for me a new analogy that I could insert at a weak part. I altered a misquotation in his which would have lost him a point. It was an inspiring experience for me. I was witnessing, in Ellis, a sportsmanship of which there could be no more refined example. I did not wonder, then, at the praise the college had given him.

But this was not all, for on the afternoon when the trials took place,—in the big, dim room of empty seats, with a few judges scattered lonesomely about,—as I took my turn and was walking to the platform, I felt a hearty clap on the shoulder and heard Ellis whisper, “Good luck to you, Priddy!” exactly the way in which he had encouraged his men in the big football[365] contests. I walked to the platform thrilled through by the magnificence of Ellis’ sporting spirit. I felt that if any other man won, it should be Ellis.

I did not do well with my oration. I was marked down. Ellis’ turn came. I watched him, admiringly, as he strode to the platform in his masterful way. His gestures, over which we had worked with patience, were still undisciplined, and at times his voice thundered too much. But he came down with the consciousness of having done his best. He was declared eligible for the final contest.

Later, when the final contest took place, Ellis, who had gone into it with the loftiest ideal of all the contestants, had the thrill of knowing that he was the winner of the prize. He had won both sides of the medal, the athletic and literary.

“At least,” he said to me, in bashful comment on his victory, “I think that some folks will be persuaded that a football man may have some interest in scholarship.”

Garvin, a fellow Senior, illustrates another phase of college life and thought. He was a clever individual and one of the editors of the college newspaper. His “den,” as he loved to term his narrow room in Wise Hall, had been made to resemble as much as possible an editorial sanctum. Galley proofs, daubed black with corrections, revisions and proof marks,[366] had been hung over his desk, as if to forever remind him that the true function of an editor is revision, as it is the true function of life. Original artists’ drawings, in charcoal, pen and ink and pencil, were mixed in with Gibson Girl sketches on the walls. Three samples of “the worst contributions ever sent into the paper” were framed in passe partout and hung over the brick of the fireplace where the curious might read them; one was a Freshman poem whose theme had never been understood and for the interpretation of which Garvin had a standing offer of a box of cigars. The “poem” said something about “the ancient cow, sitting munchingly on the steep broadside of green, fertile country,” and then went on to irrelevantly bring in various other cattle, scenes, and people in such an unexplained matter-of-fact way that the mind was in a whirl at the end. The other two contributions were attempts at stories, and judged from the first pages of manuscript exhibited, ended in being nothing more than attempts.

I had visited Garvin to speak on a matter to which I was giving considerable thought at the time: the curious disparagement of scholarship by so many of the students. I had even gone to the pains of having published in Garvin’s paper my undergraduate protest against the universal tendency to despise the “plugger” and to esteem the “grafter”; two terms which marked[367] the antipodes of scholarship. My article, entitled, “On the Spirit of Work in College,” had been printed and followed by a parody, written by an unknown student and entitled: “Priddy Has A Grouch,” in which the writer had openly given all the honors of the college to the student who refrained from seeking a salutatory, vying with his classmates for the valedictory or hastening after academic honors of whatever sort.

“Blatant heresy!” I announced, pointing out the anonymous article.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Garvin. “I rather like it!”

I regarded him in astonishment for a moment and then protested,

“But think of it, man! Denouncing scholarship! A student in a college denouncing the very charter of the college. It’s incredible: audacious and heretical: undermining the very foundations of the college! And to think that you, an editor, interested in culture and education, support such a paradox. You ought to be tortured in a Smithfield fire or have your thumbs twisted with Inquisition screws!”

“Oh, I don’t know!” smiled Garvin. “I’m not the only one that scoffs somewhat at the scholars: there are hundreds of us on the campus: hundreds of us.”

“Yes,” I replied, “sour grapes, probably.”

“Now look here, Priddy. I’m no loafer. You know me. I believe in education or I[368] would not be spending my four years here. If I were to put all my time in study: the time which I invest in my editor’s duty, for instance, and in the mandolin club, I think there is in me a potential honor man at least, even as there is in Sanderson a potential valedictorian, and in Ellis a potential Phi Beta Kappa (if he left off athletics), and in Forrest a potential magna, triple X, summa, double-barrelled cum lauda if he didn’t put so much effort into the evening classes for the Italian laborers down at the Reservoir. But the truth is—these men, like myself, aren’t very enthusiastic about high marks, or the honors that high marks and class rankings bring to the undergraduate.”

“No wonder the professors get discouraged, Garvin. It’s enough to make the college founder place dynamite under the campus and blow us to kingdom come!”

Garvin’s eyes twinkled at his next question.

“Hear about Scholarship Night, Priddy? I know you weren’t there for you went home that day.”

“Hear about it?” I gasped. “I should say I had. They say that there was about as much enthusiasm over the reading of the honor roll that night, in assembly hall, before the students and invited guests, as there is enthusiasm over—well, say a book entitled, ‘The Thesaurus of Diction—or Recent Explorations into the Vocabulary of Monkeys.’”

[369]“Enthusiasm!” repeated Garvin, “it was ten miles away that night. Just a handful of students, lonesomely huddled in the first few rows of seats and behind them a lighted vacancy. I tell you, Priddy, the students aren’t interested very much in pure scholarship: even many of the men who are here for a serious purpose.”

“Then why do they come here, Garvin, tell me that?” I demanded.

“For an education, Priddy.”

“But how can they secure an education unless they are solicitous about scholarship, Garvin?”

“Oh, I see what is the matter, Priddy. You imagine that because so many of us aren’t interested in scholarship, pure scholarship, we aren’t interested in education. Education and scholarship are two very different things.”

“How do you argue that?”

“You have the old-fashioned idea of a college,” continued Garvin.

“What do you mean?”

“The old New England college: the representative college of olden days, injected a love of books and the wisdom of books in their students: reams of the classic poets and prose writers: encyclopædic furnishings of the mind with the contents of a few good, stimulating books. Those were the hey-days of pure scholarship. They have existed here: but we students, today, are illustrations of an evolution in educational ideals, even if most of us[370] don’t seem to realize it. We represent the changed temper of higher education. If I may phrase, offhand, my idea of the change,—it is that the older generation considered pure scholarship, in itself, the central aim of a college course, and to an ideal of that sort, Scholarship Nights, Phi Beta Kappas, and all such educational fashions were not only in keeping but were producers of tremendous enthusiasms. On the other hand, what seems to me to lie in the heart of the students now is the demand for scholarship,—plus accomplishment. It is due, no doubt, to the practical turn of the world during the last few years. I am interested mightily in scholarship when it helps towards actual accomplishment: when like a gold coin it purchases something; unlike the old notion that scholarship was a gold or silver medal, good only to decorate or dignify the person, or to be kept on exhibition.”

“Are you sincere in that, Garvin?” I demanded. “If so, you should write it out in editorials, for the criticism of the professors: if you could substantiate it by concrete facts.”

“Concrete facts, Priddy! Why, it would carry us into the small hours of the morning if I were to begin their enumeration. Take Ellis, for instance. You tell me that he went into the medal contest to vindicate the athletes. There is one example of the coin of scholarship purchasing something: one concrete expression[371] of the student interest in scholarship when it leads to something practical and concrete. Can you imagine Ellis going into a literary contest that would wind up in itself, without relation to something practical to be gained by it?”

“No.”

“You go around the campus with a test like that, Priddy, and you will find that scholarship is highly respected wherever it has resulted in accomplishment. Don’t we respect Professor Florette? I should say we did. One of the most perfect scholars in the college and yet even the grafters among the students would throw their caps in the air at any time for the Professor, and why is it? It is because his scholarship has actually made him accomplish something. He is president of the National Science Division of College Instruction and is known and quoted abroad as an authority in his line. That’s why the students like him. On the other hand you might pick out a professor here and a professor there who is very erudite—notice my vocabulary, Priddy—and who is a perfect scholar in his department, and yet who never translates his knowledge into life: never writes a useful book, or influences thought abroad, or is asked to address even a Kindergarten Teachers’ Convention. All we know of him is that ‘he is a scholar.’ You don’t catch us shouting much for that man,[372] do you? He has not accomplished anything tangible, ergo—his scholarship is merely an esthetic satisfaction. That’s why we fellows prefer old Florette.”

“But that’s a very youthful and shallow way of judging, Garvin,” I replied.

“Well, whether you call it youthful, shallow, or what not, that is the way most of the students seem to regard scholarship. They are only interested in it when it means contact with life and the enlargement of the scholar’s ability for civic usefulness. That is the outcome of practical America, I suppose. But for the ‘grind’ who slaves for big marks and the sheer worship of books—and nothing else, why, I don’t have much use for him. On the other hand, if a fellow grinds out big marks to play on the football team in security: why, that’s the fellow that gets the cheer. It’s scholarship plus, with my crowd, and I think you’d better come in the band-wagon with us, Priddy, for whether the professors like it or not, and choose to cling to the seventeenth century exaltation of scholarship per se—note my Latin, Priddy—why, it won’t change matters any.”

“That’s something to think about, Garvin, at any rate.”

“If you observe the students closely, Priddy, I think you’ll find that they do respect scholarship; put it in the very highest possible place of influence—when it has led to something.”

[373]“I am glad I had this talk with you, Garvin. I think I understand the fellows a little better,—I can even forgive the unknown who wrote: Priddy Has A Grouch!”

“Thank you, Al,” replied the editor. “I am the chap!”

If the failure of Scholarship Night—and a dismal one it was—had seemed to indicate little respect for pure academic accomplishment at the College, there soon took place an event which swallowed up that failure in its overwhelming scholarly success and aroused, in the student heart, every last atom of admiration for the academical ideal. Our new President was inaugurated.

Inauguration Day was pre-eminently the real Scholarship Day with the links closely forged between what Garvin called scholarship and accomplishment. The President we were to honor represented the close tie between scholarship and accomplishment. His learning had brought him a world reputation as a scientist, and it was extremely interesting, after the talk with Garvin, to note with what unction the students lingered on the reputation of the President, and how deferentially they spoke the names of this Royal Society and that Foreign Body which had honored him for his work.

Garvin’s paper, weeks before the event, teemed with anticipatory gossip concerning the stellar names in education that were to be[374] printed on the list of college guests. The campus was to be the show ground for the American academic peerage; come to honor our chief! At last even such a loafer in the college as Bridden, who was in danger of losing his degree by reason of his overindulgence in pool: even he expressed a pride and interest in the coming of the scholars: the scholars par excellence.

Even down to so technical a consideration as the language of hoods, the undergraduates manifested fully as much interest as they had been wont to give to baseball batters’ averages. Garvin’s paper came out with a color list by which the college presidents, university chancellors, international statesmen, state officials, seminary heads and the host of lesser academics could be fully interpreted through the colors on the gowns they would wear in the procession: white signifying arts and letters, scarlet theology, purple for philosophy, blue for science, brown for music and so on through the list, which Garvin editorially advised each student to either cut out and have in his hand when the procession moved, or, better still, to carefully memorize it.

The dignity of the impending, classic, stately event; the sorting of gowns, the whispers and queries concerning what world-famous shoulders were to receive the highest degrees: all this sobered the students and stimulated[375] imaginations, days before the actual event transpired. To me it promised to be the opportunity to see, face to face, the men of culture and administrative power whose names were familiar in the far corners of the country: men who not only figured as authors, administrators, lecturers, scientists, travelers, and moral leaders, but, among them, potential Presidents of the nation, honored citizens of public reputation, men whose names were already merged with civic movements, patriotic events, and national political advances. It meant that history, successful ambition, leadership, and moral fibre were to be personified for me in their highest types.

The morning of the inauguration brought with it a great excitement. The Seniors were to wear gowns that morning for the first time. On leaving the house, after breakfast, and taking my position near the Senior Fence, to wait for the formation of the line, a sunburst of silken scarlet gown dazzled my eyes, as a sedate man of sixty, with a white beard, hurried along the path, his head topped by a black velvet bonnet. He was followed by others, in the silken glares of Oxford and Cambridge, and a continual procession of black-draped figures whose multi-colored hoods were like lurid gashes cut in the mourning by a deftly wielded blade.

By nine o’clock the campus was astir with visitors, faculty, alumni, undergraduates, the[376] band and the sight-seers. Ellis marshalled us into a double line, so that to the beholder, in our black gowns and black caps, we resembled a very mournful, if dignified, procession of upright ravens.

Then the band blared forth a martial thunderclap which pulled our feet into time. Slowly, led by the musicians, we filed on our way around the outer edge of the campus, dragging after us the faculty and distinguished visitors whose chief distinction in the procession lay in their inability or unwillingness to keep to the step we fixed. Our two hundred and odd pairs of hands swished against the sides of our flapping gowns in rhythmic evenness. Not even the precision of a Black Watch drill could have been finer rendered than was our Senior march. The heads and bodies swept from side to side like the orderly attack of a straight, long wave beating backwards and forwards against a cliff. Then, at Assembly Hall, our double line divided and we stood with heads uncovered: a lane of honor, while the recipients of honors, the visiting presidents, the faculty and the alumni threaded their way between our lines into the hall.

Deeper and deeper into formalism we plunged: all the traditions of scholarship were called up: all the esthetic possibilities of academic show and etiquette passed in review before us, cap tipping, hood placing, and the summing up of[377] the achievements of a lifetime in two sentences as an honorary degree was bestowed. The trappings and medievalism of scholarship added a new dignity to the college atmosphere. The very air we breathed was musty with the scholar’s tradition.

The only modernness in the event came in the moments of hand-clapping, as addresses, investiture and degrees followed one another. The undergraduate chorus, massed in the rear of the enormous carpeted platform, added to the impressive solemnity of the exercises by its sonorous harmonies. Then came the event of the occasion, and Ellis, knight of valor and skill on the football field, was the central figure in the event. He had been assigned the address representing the undergraduates. He stalked his way to the platform and stood before us, backed by the massed greatness of America’s university world. But he paid no heed to that, as he had not been wont to pay much heed to the thousands of on-lookers who admired his skill in the games. He took fire, and was the first to disturb the quiet soberness of the program by putting vivid gesture and loud, vibrant voice into play. The effect on the visitors and the undergraduates was electrical. Each one bent forward as, in no stately rhetoric or formal phrase, Ellis opened his heart which, at the moment, comprehended the loyalty of all the student body. As he concluded, the students[378] stood in a mass, and after the prolonged applause—the finest applause of the event—our cheer-leader dragged a husky, but thrilling college cheer from our throats, while Ellis modestly found his place in our midst. As we filed out into the light of the noon sun, and could easily discover the towering, broad shoulders of Ellis, our leader, at the head of the line, I thought of the honor he had brought to the college in his four years’ presence in it, and saw in him the union of all that is best in American college life and those qualities which the college aims to invest in every willing student’s life: loyalty to one’s fellows, physical fitness, moral alertness, humility in success, and a respect for the law that governs men and nations.

[379]

## Chapter XXXIX. The Lost
Parrot. Academic Burlesque. The
Nervousness of the Final Minute.
A Religious Outcropping in a Non-Pious
Heart

SINCE the establishment of my family in the college precincts, I had seen very little, in a social way, of my old friend Sanderson. I determined to pay him a visit one evening, and took with me a glass of grape jelly and some hermit cookies, as a remembrance from my wife.

I found him before a heap of blue papers on which were lead pencil scribbles. A look of anxiety was on his face. When he saw me, however, he smiled his pleasure, went over to the hat rack and put on his fez.

“How are you getting along, Sanderson?” I asked.

“Say,” he pleaded, “you couldn’t just run over these reports of mine on your typewriter, could you, Priddy. I’m back about a dozen,[380] and must have them in to get passing marks. It would be such a help!”

“Unfortunately, what with sermons, two prize essays on which I am working, and my own studies, Sanderson, I haven’t a spare minute!”

“Then I’ll have to root out some freshman and give him the job, though a freshman’s so uninformed! Why, I asked one of ’em to just scribble a two-page description of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and it took the idiot most a week to do it, and I don’t think it can be hard reading, from what the Prof. said about it. Now if I’d had time, I could have read it in a night!”

“Same old Sanderson,” I muttered. “I don’t know how you’d get through without help!”

“Well,” he retorted, “since you brought your wife and boy to town, you’ve done mighty little for me, eh?”

“Oh, you’ll take care of yourself,” I replied.

“Well,” he winked, “I have been lucky, lately. Jimmy’s stuck by me!”

“Who’s your latest benefactor, ‘Jimmy?’” I enquired.

“He’s a medic. who rooms across the campus. The nicest man you ever met: patient—oh, so patient, and motherly—oh, so motherly!”

“Motherly?”

“Yes, can sew patches on, and buttons, like a real endowed maiden aunt, and when I’m out[381] of sorts he reads to me, and when I prick my thumb he brings over a medicine case and drops peroxide on. I sprained my wrist at hand-ball, and Jimmy soaked and painted it with stuff, and made a firm leather brace for it. Oh, you wait till he blows in on the medical profession, he’ll fit in it as no man, before him, ever fitted in it. He looks after me like a regular private physician, if I’ll only let him come in and study with me. You see, his own room’s always so full that he wants to get away.”

Sanderson smiled significantly at me.

“Filled with a lot more soft-soapers like you, eh?” I laughed.

“Well, willing good-nature like Jimmy’s is liable to be imposed on,” he agreed. “He comes to my room for protection. I tell you, my lessons have picked up wonderfully since he came.”

“Will he be in tonight?” I asked.

“He sure will!” said Sanderson. “If he doesn’t I don’t know how I’ll get along with my biology quiz in the morning. I was saving it for him!”

“You fraud! He has his own work to do!”

“Don’t scold, please,” replied Sanderson. “He gets through his work all right. He’d starve if he couldn’t be a benefactor to somebody. He will come in tonight. We’ll have a few minutes’ chat. Then he’ll ask me about the quiz and he’ll let go at me for an hour or[382] so. Then we’ll have another chat and it will be my bedtime, for I never plan to be out of bed after half-past ten except on exceptional occasions. I’ll leave my bedroom door open while I get ready. Jimmy’ll talk to me until I let out a snore,—I’ll tell him to be sure and snap the lock after he leaves. Perhaps an hour later he’ll creep out, and go to his own room. Oh, I swear by Jimmy!”

“And get your marks by him, too, eh?”

“What’s a fellow to do?” asked Sanderson.

As I turned to go, Sanderson yawned,

“Say, Priddy, could you run in with that print on Holbein’s ‘Saint Barbara?’ I failed to get it, and we have to recite on it, in the morning. You might bring me the dope on it, too!”

I entered at last upon the final stretch towards my degree. In the stress of work and the excitement of writing a philosophical and a literary essay, in competition for two senior prizes, the days of winter changed into the brighter aspects of spring almost before I was aware of it. Once more we assembled on the campus for the class “sing,” and this time my wife could enjoy the music with me, as we stood on the corner and let our year-old boy ask, “What?” when the cheers began.

The class elections were held, the photograph of the class was taken, backgrounded against a most rustic wall of stone and arrangement of[383] wild shrubbery. Our caps and gowns soon followed the class pictures, and then we wore them to chapel, in which we marched so slowly and solemnly under the guide of our marshal, that more than one irrepressible spirit in the ranks would burst out with laughter at so much dignity in so youthful a crowd. Through these days I often grew impatient. I was eager, now, with restored health, and with a richer mine of truth, to be in a parish again, doing my chosen work.

But when commencement week arrived with its sentimental spirit,—then I felt the full significance of this last educational experience.

A band, brought from the city, gave concerts on the college club porch, amid a forest of plants and shrubs, and under fairylike illuminations. Class reunions brought crowds of graduates, who donned yellow hats, wore clownish clothes, and paraded up and down seeing how much burlesque they could express. One class engaged an Italian hand-organ artist who had also, perched on his music-box, an intelligent parrot which would pick out fortune slips from a box—for five cents. In some way the class lost the parrot, and I came across the Italian boy, crying bitterly, as he searched a wild gully for the bird, saying, when I asked him what the trouble could be,

“Ah, my parrote, he los’, my God, what I do for live now!”

[384]Meanwhile the renters of the organ sat in an automobile and raced back and forth down the main street while it scattered its wheezy music along the trail of gasolene fumes.

On one corner, a group of distinguished-looking men and women stood in the dry gutter, with slips of paper in their hands, singing with more or less effect, and great seriousness,

“Oh, the class of ’Eighty odd,
It is a glorious band,
It scatters wisdom, grace and power,
Throughout this mighty land!”

Over on the opposite side of the campus a crowd of lawyers, bankers, ministers, and business men, who would shock their neighbors at home if they had a shoe-lace untied, paraded in purple wrappers and sun-bonnets topped with paper roses.

Then the morning of graduation arrived. The mock wrappings were put aside by the visitors, who appeared in frock coats and sedate manners. By nine o’clock I joined my classmates at the fence and found my place in the line. Meanwhile crowds of people in holiday dress thronged the campus once again, members of the faculty with gowns fluttering in the wind, and with scarlet, purple, yellow, and white hoods, gathered at the administration building.

As at the Inauguration the band once more took its place at our head, struck up its vibrant tune, and then at the dropping of[385] the marshal’s baton we took the step and marched around the campus, a black, rhythmical procession of academics. The gay-hooded, but sedate faculty followed, to march through the double line of honor we formed at the entrance to the hall. Then we entered and stood at our seats until the marshal’s baton gave us the signal to be seated.

The deep platform before us was ranged with the faculty, the trustees, the recipients of honorary degrees, and the musicians, including a robed choir of students and the musical director.

But my eyes fell on the table at the head of the centre aisle on which lay a thick, flat heap of sheepskins; mine among them.

Nervously I picked up the program, and, as I looked it through, to see the catalogue of my academic career, it told to all who searched it through that Albert Priddy graduated cum laude, and that he had won four first prizes: two in his junior year and two in his senior year: two essays, a story, and a research in philosophy.

The addresses, the salutatory, valedictory, and the greeting by the faculty were given. The choir sang an impressive anthem. The honorary degrees were conferred with great solemnity. The classmate next to me said:

“Priddy, my heart is beating so fast that if we don’t get our degrees soon, it will burst. Just think if anything should prevent our getting them—now!”

[386]“Don’t mention it,” I suggested, in nervous agitation, “please.”

Finally, however, the dean came down from the platform and we stood. Then we began a very slow walk around the side aisles, down past the platform to pass before the dean and receive our degrees. Slowly, ever too slowly, I drew near, and then, a whispered “Priddy” from the Dean and the sheepskin was in my hand.

Immediately I changed the position of the tassel of my cap for I had, that moment, officially shifted myself from the undergraduate rôle of the college and entered the long, historic ranks of the alumni.

When I got back to my seat, my neighbor, who had expressed the fear that something would occur, whispered with relief:

“I’m not a religious fellow, Priddy, but I do feel like singing the doxology, now that I’ve got this!” He pointed to his diploma.

[387]

## Chapter XL. In which the
Account Comes to a Conclusion in
the Life of a Relative. Martin
Quotes Spanish and Has the
Last Word.

AFTER we had been established in a parish for some time, I suggested to my wife that probably the best Christmas present I could give my Uncle Stanwood and Aunt Millie would be to make them a personal visit after all my years of absence and recite to them all the facts of my education, my marriage, and describe to them the two interesting members of my family.

So I arrived at Uncle Stanwood’s house the week before Christmas with the intention of spending a week with him. I had been asked to preach the Christmas sermon by Mr. Woodward, the minister, who had started me off to the seminary.

My uncle was still living in a mill tenement.[388] “So you’ve got an education after all!” he commented, putting a loving hand on my shoulder. “Education has made a difference in you altogether. You are much different. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

As for my Aunt Millie, she said, “What did you marry an American for? Can she cook?”

Just then the door opened and in slouched the tallest man I ever saw; slouched past us without a word and threw himself moodily into a chair at the end of the supper table. His face had been carved—roughly carved—out of mahogany; it was gaunt, sun-beaten and lined with fret marks. He laid big, scarred hands on his plate. His shoulders drooped and yet were massive in strength. His eyes were like distant lights well back under the shadow of his bulging brows. A look of disgust seemed to have lingered on his thin, curled lips since his birth.

He was my cousin Martin who had arrived from England two years before.

When he rose up to reach out one of his great hands to me, there was a curious, unaccountable antagonism in his tone when he said, “Oh, this’s him, eh? He’s the lucky dog, is he?”

During the recital of my educational experiences which followed, I noticed that my most interested listener was Martin. When I came to those parts which had to do with self-support, he was alert in every muscle. His eyes blazed at me, devouring every word that I said.

[389]When aunt and uncle left us alone, Martin said: “Priddy, do you think the world’s treated me—oh, right, just right?”

“What do you mean, Martin?” I asked. “You’ve got fight in your tone. What’s wrong?”

“Did you never ask that, too?” he retorted, hotly. “Did you ever kick against the goad? I think you did, once. Don’t forget it, Priddy, ever! You’re not the only chap that ever wanted to get ahead, don’t lose sight of that. If it comes to matching ambition, I’ve got enough and to spare. Here you are, not much over twenty, I take it, yet you’ve got polished by seven years of schooling. Seven years of it! Have you any more right to it than me? Here I am nearly thirty and what am I? Blest if I’m anything but a hod carrier! What have I ever been, Priddy? Did I ever have a chance? I went into the mill at eight and have been there till this winter set in. God knows it’s little I know in the way of schooling! I can write my name and read some; but I got it myself. You know what the mill can be to an ambitious chap. You never felt it pressing down and stifling you more than I did. I tell you that.” He actually spit on his hands and rubbed them, as if on the verge of striking me.

“The beginning of this winter I said I wouldn’t stand it no longer, and I won’t! No mill will get me again; not if I have to starve. I nearly[390] have starved, this winter, trying to keep out. I’ve peddled shoes, run a baker’s cart, been janitor of a club-room and now I’m carrying bricks! Maybe you don’t think it’s hard! I wish you had it to go through. Perhaps you have, only your hands arn’t spoiled like mine with the frost. Even my feet are lame, this very minute, through frost. I’m earning a dollar seventy-five a day: good pay, but I shouldn’t last more than a few years at it and then——. Besides, I want to get married. She’s waiting. I’ve just got fifty dollars in the bank. Do you wonder I feel so?”

On Christmas Sunday a blackboard in front of the church announced that the “Rev. Albert Priddy, formerly of this church, will preach in the morning and evening. Everybody Welcome!”

My uncle took me aside, in the morning, and said:

“I’m coming out to hear you, Al. Do your best, lad. I’ll be with you. God knows I don’t deserve all this!”

It was a very simply arranged church; plain, white-washed walls, and a cheaply carpeted platform. While the first hymn was being sung, my Uncle Stanwood crept into a rear pew and kept his eyes down.

But while I preached, a half smile of pride stole into his face and to my excited imagination his head seemed to be nodding approval to all[391] I said. The look in his eyes seemed to be saying, “Show them, Al!”

I whispered to the minister, “Let me pronounce the benediction and while we are singing the last hymn, get down the aisle and meet my uncle. He may get out before you. He’s timid.”

But Uncle Stanwood crept out before the benediction and I did not see him again until my arrival home for dinner.

On arriving home, I was startled by what Aunt Millie did. She came up to me, patted me lovingly on the head and said, “I’m glad you did so well, Al. Your uncle’s been telling me all about it. I’ll go and hear you tonight, too.”

Martin evidently was interested, for in that belligerent tone of his, though softened by a light laugh, he said:

“I suppose I’ll have to go, too, seeing I’m his relation!”

I left the house that evening somewhat early, because I had to meet some friends. Martin was blacking his shoes; Aunt Millie was troubling herself unduly over what she should wear: a superfluous question, as she had but one Sunday dress and hat.

On my way to church that night, I could not help feeling that I must have misunderstood my aunt. I chided myself for not having read her aright. I began to realize that there was a[392] deep under-current to her nature—perhaps one of love?

It was a thought like that that proved my best girding for the evening sermon. I sat in the pulpit while the church filled; for this evening service was always well attended. The choir of mill boys and girls, led by a patriarchal man whose face and hands were white as fuller’s earth, sang stirring anthems in which we saw the Palestinian shepherds in mute adoration of the stable miracle. The congregation sang, with great unction, another Christmas theme. Martin’s head towered at the rear; but I could find no trace of Aunt Millie.

After the service, and the greetings of old-time friends, I looked about for Martin and Aunt Millie. I saw neither. It was somewhat late when I arrived home. Aunt Millie was waiting for me with a troubled face.

“You managed to hide yourself pretty well!” I laughed.

She cried as she confessed:

“I didn’t go, Al. I didn’t hear you at all. That’s the plain truth!”

“Why, I thought I saw you getting ready when I left,” I said.

“Yes, I was; but I didn’t hear you preach. I couldn’t!”

“Oh,” I laughed, “you couldn’t? What was the matter?”

“I started out; but on the way I lost heart.[393] I was afraid that I might cry out in church, with you preaching, lad. Besides, I’m not a dissenter. I was passing the Episcopal church and went in there, instead. I felt more at home. You can understand, can’t you, lad?”

Then she asked me to sit on the sofa and tell her everything I had spoken of in my sermon; not to miss a point, but to give it all. She gave my points commendation, remarking every now and then while her eyes brimmed with tears, “It must have done them good, that!”

Uncle sat at the lower end of the room, saying not a word; but listening, carefully. In the midst of my report the front door opened, and Martin, taking long, determined strides, hurried through the room without looking at any of us, closed the kitchen door with a bang, and left us looking into each other’s faces in bewilderment.

“Maybe he’s mad at something you said, Al. You didn’t chance to look his way and talk of ‘coming to God,’ did you?”

I solemnly averred that I had not been so evangelical as that. My aunt hurried into the kitchen where she lingered for a few moments. On her return she said:

“It’s all right, Al. There’s nothing wrong. He’s just impressed by hearing you preach, that’s all. He said to me, ‘If education can do that, for a fellow, I want some of it!’”

The next morning a heavy snow was falling.[394] Martin would have no work. After breakfast he asked me if I would go into the parlor and have a talk, he wanted to ask me something. I readily agreed.

The former antagonism had gone from his voice as he began to speak. His words came quietly, curiously, like a child’s.

“Priddy, what can a chap learn to be in college?”

“What do you mean? What does a college fit men for?” I asked.

Martin nodded soberly, his eyes fixed on mine.

I laughed, “Oh, college will train you for almost any profession; that is, the professional schools will. You can study to be a doctor, a lawyer, a forester, a teacher—oh, anything you think of!”

“What do you think’s the best kind of a thing for a chap to be?”

“Why,” I replied, in embarrassment, “that depends upon the fellow, you know.”

“Well,” said Martin, “what kind of a profession would you advise a chap like me to take, for instance?”

I smiled, knowing what all this fencing meant. “Forestry is a good profession, just now,” I advised. “It’s a new branch to the government and brings in good money. I am sure you would like to be a forester.”

“What’s his work, especially?” came the question.

[395]I explained, as best I knew, the different functions of a trained forester, emphasizing, “Mind you, Martin, he’s paid for what he knows and not what he does with his hands. He doesn’t have to chop down trees and all that sort of stuff; but he knows all about saving the forests, improving them, doctoring them.”

“How long does it take a man to learn that trade?” was the next question.

“About seven years, including college and professional school.”

“It would take a fellow like me that long?”

“Oh,” I admitted, reluctantly, for I felt that this would put a stop to any ambition that he had, “of course you are not ready for college. That would mean at least three years more!”

Martin mused,

“Seven and three—ten. I’m twenty-eight years old. That would bring it up to thirty-eight.”

“Yes,” I assented, “but you must remember that there are a good many working years left, after that!”

“I’m not thinking about myself; it’s Nora. We planned to get married by spring. Of course I should put it off. I wonder if you’d help me?”

“Help you—how—what?”

“Help me to explain to Nora; so she’ll wait—wait probably that long!”

“You can count on me to help you in anything, Martin.”

[396]“When she knows it’s for her betterment, maybe she’ll be willing,” interjected Martin, as if in argument with himself.

I nodded, vigorously.

“Anyway,” he said with that belligerent tone of his, “she’ll have to be!”

Under the inspiration of this conversation, I pulled Martin out of the house and took him to the public library, where we asked for a bundle of preparatory school and college catalogues. These we whispered over and patiently studied until noon. We found that, by unusual labor, it would be possible for Martin to get his preparation, his college degree, and his professional training within nine years! As a further proof of our optimism, we decided that Martin should enter Yale when he was fitted!

We found from the catalogue of the preparatory school that Martin had decided upon, that the term opened within two days. When I advised Martin to write a letter to the principal and await a reply, he stormed at me:

“And probably it would be a week before I heard from him. That would put me behind the classes—and you would be gone, too. If they aren’t overcrowded, why, I’ll not wait to write; but just take my fifty dollars and go. They can only say no.”

His decision made, Martin began to show me what a decided nature he possessed. He drew the fifty dollars out of the bank. He bought[397] some necessary clothes out of the money. The next day he gave notice to the contractor that he would carry bricks no more. Then he outlined his scheme to uncle and aunt.

My Aunt Millie stormed.

“This education business is getting on my nerves. First it’s one and then another of you.” Turning on me she said, “Nice way of treating us: coming to take a good paying boarder from us—and we need the money so, too!”

But Martin interjected, “Look here, I did it all myself. Blame me for it!”

But my aunt would not be consoled. “And I’d been planning so for the wedding, too!” she exclaimed.

As I chanced to be going on a trip to the Seminary at the time, I told Martin that I could be his companion as far as he had to go.

“But you’ve got to go to the North End with me and help me explain matters to Nora. You’ve got a smoother tongue than I have and she’ll listen to you.”

So Martin and I started out on our dismal mission. Nora lived on the top floor in one of the tenements. She was a stout, fair-faced woman of twenty-seven with a way of casting her head sidewise when she spoke to me, as if she had trouble with her sight. She stood gazing at us, at that unexpected hour, from behind the ironing-board. The odor of burning cloth[398] reached my nostrils, as she stood wondering. She had burnt the shirtwaist and no amount of frantic rubbing with soap could take the scar out.

She dismissed us to the parlor while she put on a more presentable dress. Martin said not a word to me; but he pointed dumbly to his photograph in a place of honor on the mantel.

Nora came into the room exclaiming:

“Why, Martin, didn’t you let me know? What’s the matter?”

Martin started to speak; but could not. He nodded to me.

Carefully, painfully, hesitantly, I outlined Martin’s ambition to Nora. More than that I explained the reasonableness of it, the prime importance of it to their later fortunes. I tried to paint in glowing terms the high station to which Nora, through Martin, might be exalted. I leaped from point to point with enthusiastic eloquence, when the theme had mastered me. But when I had concluded, and was looking eagerly into the young woman’s face for a favorable sign, she gasped, then in a cold voice she said:

“Oh, yes, it’s all right for him; but don’t I know that if he goes to college he’ll meet other girls, better looking, better dressed, better educated than I am, or can ever hope to be. Suppose I don’t break off this engagement now, how am I to know that he’ll not forget me,[399] throw me over. Have you thought of that in all your plans?”

“Martin’s a man of his word, I suppose,” I protested.

“You’d find me true, Nora,” declared Martin.

“How long do you want me to wait?” demanded the girl.

“Only about seven or eight years or so!” haltingly explained Martin.

Nora leaped to her feet and stamped the floor, angrily, imperatively.

“You’d keep me waiting seven or eight years; waiting that long for you, with all the risk! Not me! Not for a thousand Martins!”

That was her answer. We left her without more words. We left her watching us, crying. Martin commented, when we were outside:

“Now, if she’d only had more faith in me and made me feel certain of victory, maybe I’d given the whole thing up; but now—we’ll go tomorrow, sure!”

The following evening we sat in the North Station in Boston, awaiting the train that would carry us on an all-night journey. Every nerve Martin possessed quivered with pessimism. He scolded, chided, lodged complaints at everything and everybody. He tried to give me the impression that I had made a prisoner of him; that he no longer had any initiative of his own. As we sat in the waiting room he held humorous monologues the purport of each one being,[400] “What a fool I am, at my age, to be running out among a lot of kids to get ready for college. What a fool!” During that hour’s wait, he had resolved four times to expend that fifty dollars in a ticket to the orange groves of California. Finally, when he had been brooding in silence for some moments, with a quick action he pulled out his pocket book, handed it to me and said, savagely, “Here, take this and keep it safe. No matter how I beg or what I say, don’t let me have it. To make things sure, you’d better run and get me my ticket to the school; then I’ll be sure and not turn back!”

As our train started from the station it plunged into a heavy, blinding snow-storm that had been raging throughout the entire day. Once in our seats, Martin recommenced his tirades against this “foolishness.” But there were propitious signs near at hand, for his encouragement. A man was coming down the aisle looking for a seat in whom I recognized a Seminary comrade of mine. He was a stubby fellow of middle age, with an ill-kept, drooping moustache.

“Say, Harlan, old fellow,” I greeted, “stop right here and meet my cousin.” When he was seated, I talked with him, and, for Martin’s benefit, to whom I slyly winked as I talked, brought out the fact that Harlan had been much older than my cousin when he had started out for an education. Nay, he had been handicapped with a wife and a child! Now he[401] enjoyed the dignity of the ministerial profession. The moral was evident to Martin. He braced up and became very agreeable, especially to my old friend Harlan.

We talked in low tones until three o’clock in the morning, at which time the brakeman called out the station where I should leave Martin to his fortunes. The poor fellow seemed on the verge of tears as he gripped his suit-case and followed me to the door as the train slacked up its speed. I looked off from the platform. The storm had not abated. I could see only a great snowdrift where the station platform should have been. A street light flickered weakly out on the street.

As Martin dropped up to his knees in the snowdrift and reached for his suit-case I whispered:

“Find a hotel, and let me hear from you, old fellow. Keep up your courage. If there’s anything I can do, call on me!” Harlan waved his hand and called, “Never too late to mend!” an aphorism which might have been pertinent to the occasion, and then the brakeman’s lantern swung. As the train lumbered through the drifts, I saw Martin bend his head to the storm, lift his suit-case above the drifts, and go plodding towards the street light. The station was deserted, and I hoped that my cousin would find some one to direct him before the storm discouraged him.

[402]A few months later, I stopped off at the town where I had left my cousin. He met me at the train, the same serious man I had left, though with a trace of a smile on his face and more of content in his speech than before. He guided me past a grocery store and said:

“I get up at four in the morning, do my studying, then before classes I go out and take orders for that firm.”

He led me down a placid street, through the shovelled paths of snow, and after opening the front door led me into a well-warmed and very nicely furnished chamber.

“I do their chores and earn the rent for this room,” he announced, with a grim smile. “Furnace to look after, paths to shovel, and baby to keep happy, if it wakens when they want to go to an entertainment.”

At supper time he led me into the heart of the town into an eating-house. He had a meal ticket punched by the waitress.

“This ticket costs three dollars,” he said, “enough to last a week at three meals a day. I make it last three weeks by scrimping and having a bottle of milk a day in my room.”

“How do you like the school?” I asked, pleased with these evidences of his thrift.

“Well,” he mused, “they are a lot of kids, to be sure, and I’m quite a freak among them. ‘Grandad’ Martin they call me. I suppose they’ve never had so old a man in their classes[403] before. Anyhow, that’s the way you would argue from their looks and talk. But it doesn’t bother me—much. I guess we’ll all get used to it, by and by.”

“How is Nora getting along?” I ventured to enquire.

“Married!” he snarled, and talked no more about that.

“What do you think about this opportunity, Martin?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for fifty weddings!” he declared.

Throughout the year I received word from him, couched in various tempers of letters. Sometimes he was about to throw the whole ambition over, because as he wrote, his mind was not as fresh as it might be. Then he would write that the boys wanted him to become a member of the basket-ball team, but he had refused, because, he argued, so old a man, and so tall a one, would not do in playing against sixteen and eighteen-year-olds! In spring, he had trouble with his French. Then a complication of physical troubles cropped out, as if to test his patience. Finally, after being confined to his bed by illness, and having had to forego the final examinations, he decided that he was too old to keep at it, and that he had too many handicaps. He went to the West, thus keeping to his old intention, and after he had secured the position as “boss” of a large gang of men,[404] on construction work, a “shirt-sleeved, and white collar job” as he termed it, he wrote to me the following letter.

“My dear Cousin:

“Don’t feel at all that you did me a bad turn by having me go to that school for a year. It was the most profitable investment I have ever made! I find that out more and more each day. It has released me, perhaps forever, from that miserable hand drudgery I always hated, for in that single year’s contact with polite speech, with teachers, and with the finer opportunities of life, I was given more confidence in myself and my opportunities. I am not afraid to approach educated people any more. I hold my head up higher; I feel myself more of a man. I can even write at the end of my letter, something impossible before, ‘Remunda de pasturaje hace becerros gordos,’ which is a Spanish proverb out here for, ‘Change of pasture makes fat calves!’ God bless our schools!”

The End

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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