THROUGH THE SCHOOL




[Illustration: 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_

  [Illustration]

  THE PILGRIM PRESS
  BOSTON      NEW 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.




_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
    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

  _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

  _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
    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




_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




THROUGH THE SCHOOL




THROUGH THE SCHOOL

[Illustration]




_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 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 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; 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

“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 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 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.

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 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 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 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
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:

  “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, 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 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. 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.




_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 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; 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 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 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,

“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 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
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 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 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 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,

“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!”




_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, 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!”

“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. 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 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 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,

“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 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.




_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?”

“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 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.”

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 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.
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,

“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 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!

“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!”

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 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 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 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 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!




_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. 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
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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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.”




_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 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?”

“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, 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.

“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 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.”

“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:

“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 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 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!”

[Illustration: JASON, THE POET, LOOKED IN]

“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 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
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.




_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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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.




_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 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,’
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 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. 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 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. 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 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.”

“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 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 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!

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 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?”




_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 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 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 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 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!”

“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 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.




_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 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,” 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 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.”

“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 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. 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, 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.

“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 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.”




_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 “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 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 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 ‘_H_i’ instead of the pronoun ‘I.’ And ‘w’at’
instead of ‘what,’ and ‘Forbid it, _H_almighty 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 ‘_H_is life so dear _h_or
peace so sweet _h_as to be bought _h_at 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 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 _H_egg, please?” and “Look _h_out 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 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.

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.




_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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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!”




_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 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!”

“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.

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 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!




_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 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 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.

[Illustration: 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:

“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 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.




_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 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 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, 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 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.

“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.




_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 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.”

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 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 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.

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?”




_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 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, 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 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 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.




_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?”

“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 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 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 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 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 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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anything to get to New York, Thropper.”

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

“As soon as I can get it!” I replied.




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

“I shall miss you, Priddy!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: SAY, HOW MUCH YO’ WANT FO’ DAT WATCH]

“Fifty-four cents!” announced the woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

“Hello!” I cried. “How are you?”

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

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

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

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

I gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

She burst into mocking laughter and said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then my uncle asked a perfectly natural and innocent question.

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

Tremblingly I whispered:

“A preacher, I think!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He counted into my hand fifty dollars and said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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




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


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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

“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 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.

“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 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?”




_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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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.




_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,

“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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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!”




_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!”

“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!”

“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 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 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. 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!

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, larger conception came, and I found a
nobler faith than I ever had before. The self-distrust and miserable
vacancy of doubt, were, as I had blunderingly told Burner, mere phases
towards a positive faith. One winter morning, after a night of mental
struggle, during which I suffered fully as much as I had ever suffered
from any physical hardship, I went out on the campus to walk about in
the crisp air. The students had just gone into the chapel for morning
prayers. I stopped under the windows and heard the drone of the parlor
organ. Then, on the quietness of the morning, the manly melody came
to my ears: a hymn resonant with a man’s faith, and bringing peace
to my doubts. “Oh, Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” they were singing,
a monkish, monastic tinge to it, coming from male throats,--only
the tenor was too boyish for a monk, too thrillingly rampant in its
ambitious soaring after God over the high notes. But it soothed me and
I went in the strength of that hymn for many days.




_Chapter XXVII. The Wonderful Summer on the Pleasure Island_


My next opportunity of earning money for my education came in a call to
preach on Sundays in a little church sixty miles from the Seminary at a
fashionable summer resort. The compensation to be ten dollars a week:
compensation for three days’ absence from the Seminary, one hundred
and twenty miles of travel and expenses, and the nervous exertion of
preaching twice and teaching a Sunday-school class, not excluding
pastoral work whenever opportunity should offer!

These weekly journeys began when I arose on Saturday morning at five
o’clock, drank a hastily prepared cup of cocoa, and hurried off to
the station for the six o’clock train. Then the train would start on
its way through the snowdrifts, puffing and gasping down white aisles
through rows of stiff, stately pines whose hands held puffy clouds of
snow, and then followed a slow passage through miles of birches bending
low under the weight of wet snow like robed saints humbled by too
great a weight of glory. The railway trip was followed by a steamer
journey of eight miles through a heavy, sad sea which never seemed to
have any light in it, and in whose icy surface pretty grey and mottled
gulls were not afraid to dip their palpitating breasts. The steamer put
me ashore on an island whose centre was loaded with a serried row of
little mountains. At the landing I found a stage and drove for eight
miles over the island to my parish. The stage horse rushed us down
dipping roads that threaded between precipitous mountain sides, whose
summits were desert rocks and at whose feet had crumbled cliff after
cliff of red rock, spread out like a rusty iron yard. Then the road
became a climb until some highlands were attained and we sped through
a little fishing village which nestled close to a mysterious, secluded
cove, guarded by stern, fretted cliffs, a place where Stevenson would
have had a cave of smugglers or the anchorage of a rakish pirate craft.
Then came a turn in the road, where, behind a fringe of thick, old gold
birches and in the midst of some dead oak stumps, nature had placed a
cathedral pile of gigantic slabs of stone, one on another, as if to
show to man what the angels of strength could do once they started to
build with stone. Next followed a bewildering ride over a spiral road
up a steep hill on which stood aristocratic summer homes. At a lookout
where the road took a sudden dip, one saw the cold ocean far down
below with its heavy, listless breakers pounding wearily against the
iron cliffs, as if saying, “Why do the poets insist on our ceaselessly
trying to shatter this cliff? I wish they would let us rest through
the winter, till the summer visitors come: then I will pound like
Vulcan’s hammer to please them!” In the distance, little dismal islands
stood in the sea like burnt dumplings in gravy. Over them the gulls
were screaming and wailing, adding to the solitude and the winter’s
dreariness. Then the stage slanted down the hill and after a long,
twisting ride drew up before the village post-office, where I met my
host and was duly welcomed as the new minister.

Back and forth, week after week, returning to the Seminary on Monday
evenings, I accomplished my journeys faithfully. Each week besides
my studies I had to plan for the church. There was little time for
idleness, for the hours of recreation were taken up in travel. On these
trips I took a book and tried to have it read on my return.

But my reward was near at hand. The summer arrived, and with it
an inflow of wealth, honor, and leisure to my parish. A wonderful
transformation came over the island--the Pleasure Island. Boards were
unscrewed from cottage windows. The dead grass gave way to green
carpets. Lifeless sticks budded with colored foliage. The dead sea
and the listless waves became animated with restless energy. The
sun kissed the roads into smoothness and lined the highways with
flowers. Fresh painted steamers, with flying banners, whistled into the
wharves and unloaded crowds of visitors. Steam yachts lay at anchor
in the cove. The white wings of yawls and catboats were dipping in
the breeze. The mountain paths had been re-charted and were filled
with adventurers. The pine groves and the quiet cliffs lured tired
men and women to their restful silences. Trout fishers rubbed oil of
camphor over their faces to restrain the ambitious stings of flies
and mosquitoes, and sought the brook pools where Walton’s classic
trout waited to be played with. My little rustic church became filled
with city people, who not only sat in the pews, but sang in the
choir, decorated the pulpit with flowers and grasses, and served on
responsible committees.

Then, too, my rest and opportunity came, for we had a list of
distinguished clergymen and professors who were to occupy my pulpit
every Sunday morning, for the resort was very rich in clerical talent
of a willing and gracious sort. We had so much professional talent
indeed, that one morning near the post-office I beheld two bishops,
two university presidents, two professors, and a world-famous author
standing on less than two square yards of ground!

We left the doors and the windows of the church open while the noted
men preached, and their voices had to vie with the song birds who
perched on the waving trees outside the windows. The sea tang blew
across the church, the sweetest of summer incense.

I had little enough to do, for the people were too busy with pleasure
to be at home: they wanted me to sit on the cliffs with books and take
a rest--on a salary.

But there came calls to preach on some of the outlying islands to which
I was carried on different Sunday afternoons in a launch.

Then they all left us, tanned, virile, rested: the whole community
took itself to the decks of the island steamers and was carried to the
trains. The tennis courts were closed. The shutters were fastened over
the display windows of the flower stand. Many pews were empty in my
little, rustic church. The flowers and shrubs were bedded in straw.
Soon the snow and frost and bleakness of winter would spread over the
island. My second pastorate ended, too, for I had received a call to
supply a larger church much nearer to the Seminary, a church where I
intended to preach after my graduation from the Seminary.




_Chapter XXVIII. How a Parsonage Suggests a Wife. The Convincing
Revelations of a Phrenologist Who Examined the Students’ Bumps_


On the return to the Seminary, to enter upon my senior year, the first
men I missed were Burner and Tucker, who had graduated the previous
summer. Burner wrote me a very interesting letter from the precincts of
a prominent New England university to the effect that he was a member
of the junior class of that institution, that on Sundays he preached
in a very delightful country town; that he was having a rich feast in
college fare; the courses in animal psychology, metaphysics, especially
in relation to the fundamentals of faith, holding the fullest
fascination for him. Tucker, able at last to do a preacher’s work, not
only to his own personal taste, but also to the gratification of his
parish, was giving himself, sacrificially, to the work of dignifying
the life of the people who had called him. He wrote me that he felt
his special work in life to have two phases to it: that he should
remain unmarried in order that, like a monk, he could do God’s work
with singleness of purpose, and that he should go only to struggling,
discouraged parishes where the small salaries and the hardships formed
a sufficient missionary challenge: parishes in which he should labor
until they were transformed and able finally to pay a salary on which
a permanent, married man could settle among them and give them the
fullest, freest service.

“I am setting myself,” concluded Tucker, “to be a mortgage-lifter,
parsonage-getter, and salary-raiser for other ministers who are to
follow me!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Love: brown-haired young woman.”

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do I look, Priddy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

I gazed on him with startled eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at her with great astonishment.

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

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

“I had never thought of that!”

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

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

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

“How is that?” I asked.

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

As I descended from my pulpit the following Sunday morning, I was
introduced to a quiet youth who was recommended to me as a Senior in
the college. That afternoon my new acquaintance came down to the
parsonage and willingly permitted me, in my curiosity, to question
him concerning the traditions, the customs, and the personnel of the
college. I asked him some very trivial and laughable questions, I
remember, because, at the time, I had some very curious and perhaps too
exalted notions concerning colleges, especially colleges of the high
standard of the one in which I had just matriculated and to which I was
to journey on the morrow.

After our conversation, the Senior promised to call for me next day and
escort me to the college: a proffer which I was glad to accept.

That September Monday morning was a very pleasant one in the Northern
country. The maple groves on the hill slopes made one think that God
had let fall his color pots, for the leaves of the trees flamed with
reds, with yellows, and with blacks. The mail wagon drove up to the
parsonage door and collected myself, the Senior, and my trunk. My wife
stood at the door telling me not to forget this and that, with true
motherly solicitude. Then, with a dash through the dust, the wagon
wheeled us on our way across the river to the train that should carry
us to within four miles of college.

The Senior said, as we changed at a junction,

“The train that will get us to college does not go for some hours. Are
you fit for a four-mile walk? We can eat lunch on the way. I have some
in my suit-case.”

I agreed that I was ready for the walk, so we left the town precincts
by walking through a lumber yard.

Our travel took us over a cinder path between the ties and switch rods
of a railroad. At the right, far below us, flowed a very wide and swift
river, whose surface twinkled through the shields of pine and white
birch which lined the bluff. Here we met several young men walking
slowly and engaged in earnest conversation.

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

When some mill whistles at a remote distance announced the noon hour,
the Senior conducted me to a grove of stiff, tall pines where on the
brown, fragrant needles he spread a lunch of sandwiches, jelly, and
pears.

Then we took up the walk again, passing on into the wilderness of trees
and rushing river. At a turn in the track we came to a high cliff whose
outer surface was stained with moss and glistened with dampness. The
Senior stopped before a niche out of whose cool interior spouted a
stream of ice-cold water, bringing to mind the rock which Moses struck
with his wand and which slaked the thirst of the children of Israel.

“Nearly every student who passes this way,” the Senior announced, “gets
a drink of this water.”

Ten minutes later we walked into the station and I was amazed at the
heaps of trunks that covered the platform. Drays were doing their
best to reduce the pile by carting them away in enormous loads. As
we made our way around the trunks there dashed into the station one
of the coaches I had seen near the tavern on my previous visit; this
time topped by a group of healthy-faced, shouting students, wearing
tan shoes, flannel trousers, and flapping caps such as clowns, in the
circus rings, wear with such comical effect. This coach was quickly
followed by another, similarly loaded with students come down to greet
the arrival of classmates and friends.

At last I was able to realize the task that was on my hands if I were
to fit into the college life, for scores of students passed us or
trailed after us as the Senior and I walked up the hill. How should
I ever succeed in remembering their names, in entering into the
acquaintance of a small number of all those students? And the trains
were bringing more!

On top of the hill, just before entering the campus, some fraternity
houses, lavishly appointed, had their verandahs filled with students,
singing snatches of songs and bantering one another. Then there flashed
into view again, the campus and the business street, only on this
occasion it was a far different campus and a very different business
street from what I had seen on my previous visit. The sidewalks were
thronged with students, some leaning against shop windows, others
sitting on steps, while others roamed along engaged in conversation.
On the campus, keeping to the paths, were groups of Freshmen walking
timidly enough past Sophomores in sweaters and negligee attire and past
Seniors in graver dress and mien. On the front lawn of a dormitory four
neatly-dressed youths were beating rugs and as their energetic actions
continued they were half smothered in the clouds of dust.

“I should imagine that they would don rougher clothes while they dust
rugs,” I commented to the Senior.

My companion smiled, knowingly,

“They have no chance to change clothes,” he replied. “They are Freshmen
which some of the upper-classmen have picked up from the campus and
compelled to do that work. It will be the Freshmen’s turn, next year,
however, so that it isn’t much of an imposition. Now you’ll see some
fun. Watch that football man with the sweater!”

The football man in the sweater had come out of the dormitory and had
gone over to the Freshman who was working more energetically than his
fellows, and said to him,

“Say, Freshie, what’re you sleeping on the job like that for, eh? Do
you want the Sophs. to give you a black mark so soon?”

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

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

“If you call that work, then,” stormed the football man, “I wonder what
you do when you loaf? Die probably, eh?”

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

“Just carry that up to my room, put it straight, set the furniture in
place, and then go to work and copy those marked extracts from the
coach’s note-book which you’ll find on the desk. Hurry and have it done
in two hours’ time!”

As the football man ended those savage orders, he turned away with an
amused smile and as he came towards us he winked and said to the Senior,

“That young cuss’s got the making of a fine kid in him, even if he is
the son of a several hundred thousand dollar Senator. Just watch him
make the dust fly! Ain’t he a peacherino, though!”

The Senior informed me, after the football man had strolled away, that
the fagging was in full force just then and that the Freshmen took
it in good humor, and, in fact, would have considered themselves not
actually at college had that feature been omitted.

The different noises that filled the air made a Babel. From dormitory
windows came shouts, cornet practise, and various moanings which, at a
quieter time, would have been differentiated as vocal trios and duets.
Down the business street, from the upper floors where some of the
fraternities had rooms, the sounds of clanging piano rag-time tried
to merge with explosive bellowings of happy, singing fraternity men.
On the College Club porch a jostling crowd of students could be seen,
shaking hands, telling summer experiences, and knocking chairs about
in the anxiety to get at one another. The shop windows were gay with
college banners, souvenirs, books, picture cards, college photographs,
and sporting goods.

I found the furniture I had purchased from Garden heaped before my door
and a half hour later I had it scattered lonesomely over the floor
of my large room. From my open window I could look down on the stir
of life on the campus. Night deepened, and with it came an increase,
rather than a quieting of the noises, as if Youth were bound to have
one last, gleesome frolic before the sedate masters of Books curbed
their liberties. In the darkness of the night, sitting at the window,
exactly as I had done at Evangelical University six years previously,
I had an alien feeling as I listened to the sounds which soared up to
my ears from the gloom below. Demon yells, demon howls of acute misery,
throbbings of mandolin strings, the hoarse tooting of a fish horn, a
piercing falsetto voice under my window trying to sing,

  “O, O, O! Dear, dear old days, love!”

the clanging of a hand bell and intermittent revolver shots. These were
only a few of all the riot of sounds spreading through the night air,
over the campus and bursting out of the dormitory windows on every side
of me. While I sat wondering how a hundred or so of faculty could ever
bring seriousness out of such a chaos of youthful energy, I heard a
chug underneath my window as a truckman hurled a trunk to the sidewalk:
my trunk. Immediately I went on the campus, discovered two Freshmen,
and with all the abandon of a Junior that I could muster for the
occasion, I coolly invited them to assist me in carrying the heavily
loaded trunk up the three flights of stairs. So conformed to the
fagging custom were the Freshmen, that when one of them unfortunately
sliced his finger on a loose nail and I commiserated him on it, he
said, keeping his grip on the trunk, meanwhile,

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

Next morning the trio of bell chimes, in the tower of the college
chapel, hurled clanging, throbbing scales-of-three over the quiet
campus. Immediately from the doorways of dormitories, boarding clubs,
and the Commons, appeared chatting groups of students who took the
paths across the campus towards the first chapel service. From the
North, the South, the East and the West they hurried; hundreds and
hundreds of well-dressed youths, arm in arm or four and five abreast as
they walked.

The choir, transepts and gallery were soon crowded, almost to
suffocation. The morning sun in trying to break through the windows
into the dimness merely glorified the pictured saints, and prophets,
shepherds and sheep. The gowned organist played a part of the grand
finale of The Pilgrim’s Chorus. The gowned figure of the President
arose and stood silent a second while a wave of reverent stillness
swept through the chapel. Scripture followed hymn, and a simple
prayer was followed by a general confession. Then the organ burst
into a triumphant recessional, and the students noisily crowded down
the aisles into the open air. The day’s work was begun, having had
invoked on it the blessing from the Author of all Truth, and the
Creator of that World which throughout the days and years, has had such
fascination for students and professors, of Science, of Art and Faith.

In the confusion of the multitude of students, most of them strangers
to me, I felt the futility of my social ambitions. In Evangelical
University and in the theological seminary I had been in the midst
of small groups of students, whose names, characteristics and
acquaintance could be compassed in a few short weeks. But the vast
procession of young men which blackened the greensward of the campus
that morning dismayed me. It seemed that mere hand-shaking and saying
to each individual member of it, “I am glad to know you!” would demand
months and months of time. It was a new experience, too, after the
simple democracy in my previous schools, to have those who were my
classmates and college associates, pass me without a word of morning
greeting, without a lift of the eyes.

But that was only the first day!

The second morning, as I sat in the chapel, I chanced to have my
attention attracted by a curious fingering of paper. It was the student
next to me who had some blank sheets of paper in his hands which he
shuffled intermittently and over which he kept passing the ball of his
forefinger. The organ had not ceased its prelude, and the students
had not ceased entering the chapel, so I paid a stricter attention to
the strange recreation of my companion. Though he shuffled his blank
papers with great skill and fingered their surfaces with scientific
regularity, his eyes--wide, staring ones,--were kept fixed on the
President’s pulpit--never once did they turn on my inquisitiveness or
towards the papers.

One of the students then slipped by me and took a vacant seat next to
this shuffler of papers. As soon as he was seated, however, he bent
forward and said, to me,

“Your name’s Priddy, isn’t it? I’m Sanderson, the monitor who keeps the
attendance of this section. By the way, have you met Quarles? Quarles,”
he said to the student who was shuffling the papers, “meet Priddy, your
classmate!” Quarles, without taking his eyes from their fixed stare on
the President’s pulpit, extended me his hand, and said, in a very quiet
voice,

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

I expressed my amazement that he should be in college.

“Oh,” Sanderson exclaimed, “it doesn’t seem to bother him any. I notice
that he’s getting on for Phi Beta Kappa. He makes us hump!”

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

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

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

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

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

“He manages all right,” interrupted Sanderson, “why, Priddy, he’s taken
nineties in calculus, French and German and Greek, and is right there
when it comes to such graft courses, as philosophy and English! Oh,
you don’t need to pity him: rather pity me, who with my eyesight, am
hardly able to pull through Fine Arts One!”

Quarles then explained to me how, before taking his courses, he had a
student read to him the complete text which he translated into Braille
with his blind-writing apparatus, on sheets of paper. He also used the
same instrument, almost as quickly as we, with our sight, would use our
pencils in the professor’s lectures. The leaves he had been shuffling
that morning, formed a reading lesson in French.

Everybody was the friend of Quarles. He would be groping his way alone
over a path to a class but a brief moment, for a student, playing
ball, nearby would signal to his comrade, who would hold the ball, and
then, throwing down his glove would hurry over, have a cheery word
of greeting, ask Quarles whither he was bound, link arms with the
blind student and guide him into a path where he could find his own
way without need of piloting. In this way, Quarles must have felt the
arm of nearly every upper-classman, for not only were they willing to
straighten out his walks for him, and read to him, but they also took
him with them on excursions, which he shared with excellent comradeship
and proved to be as good a mountain climber as the best.

In this way, too, through walks, at meals, and in classes, I soon had
the students differentiated and had a formidable list of friendships.

It was my custom, throughout the fall months when the highways were
hard and untouched by snow, to ride weekly to and from college on
a bicycle which I had bought for that purpose. On this twenty-mile
excursion, along a winding river and through quiet, little hamlets, I
had certain resting-places where I could breathe and refresh myself
with a sup of water.

Doctor Floyd’s well, conveniently near the highway at the summit of
a steep grade, had also a rustic bench near it, from which a most
gratifying vista could be obtained, which included the view of a
pyramidal mountain cone framed in a circular opening of twinkling
poplar leaves, at whose foot a silvery dash of river curved under high,
bush-lined banks, with now and then a cow or a colt completing the
composition by standing in the river.

The Doctor, himself, whose permission to drink of the water and to
seat myself on the bench for a rest I had taken pains to secure, was
a short, stout, bald-headed man of about sixty, whose clean-shaven
cheeks were always flushed by an excess of blood. He had retired from
active practise and was engaged in the delightful, old age recreation
of seeing how many eggs he could persuade a harem of Plymouth Rocks to
lay through a most careful, scientific mixture of laying foods, use
of germless drinking troughs, and adaptation to an expensive mode of
existence.

One Saturday noon, as I sat on the bench puffing for breath, for the
day was both dusty and hot, the Doctor, with the egg record for the
week in his hands, which he came down to show me, sat down on the bench
and said,

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

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

“Usually,” he explained, “more’n half of the students in the college
over there don’t know why they’re there!”

“Oh,” I said, “there are a great number of my friends who are not
certain what they are going to do in the world, after graduation, if
that is what you mean, Doctor.”

He rubbed his fat hands in revengeful gratification.

“That’s just it! Just it!” he laughed, cynically. “It’s all a waste
of good money and precious time. There’s no good can come of it.
They don’t take their studies seriously enough. Let me see, how many
subjects does a student have to select from under that new-fangled
election system they have--study made easy, I call it--how many, now?”

“I think there must be in the neighborhood of a hundred different
courses, a majority of which are elective, so far I know.”

“And the young lazybones pick out the easiest courses they can,
independent of the good it’ll do ’em, eh?”

“Perhaps they do,” I replied, antagonized by his critical and
belligerent tone. “But then, I don’t believe that a liberal education:
a college course, has to do merely with giving a student a lot of
technical information!”

The little man fussily remonstrated.

“What? I thought that colleges were in the world to fit men for their
work, and that if they’re to be doctors, why, they’re to be taught
medicine and nothing else!”

“That is the function of professional schools,” I agreed. “Take my
case, for instance. I am a minister. I spent three years in a good
theological seminary. While there I wanted technical information on
my profession. I got it, and assimilated more or less--perhaps less.
But when I came to college I did not come to add to my technical
theological knowledge; not at all!”

“What did you come for, then,” he asked, with another sneer, “to get
the degree, I suppose, like a lot of others?”

“I don’t think you give me credit for being a man of ordinary
intelligence,” I replied, hotly, angered by his insinuation.

“Then what under heaven did you come to college for, if not to increase
your theological information and whatever ability you might have as a
preacher.”

“I came to college,” I replied, “to get the other man’s point of
view. I reasoned with myself that a purely technical education tends
to narrow a man unless supplemented by an education which might be
entitled, ‘The Other Man’s Point of View.’”

“That’s a thrust at me,” replied the Doctor, “as if to say that I,
because I took my medicine with old Dr. Desbrow, and never went to one
of your colleges, was narrow. The idea!”

“I was not alluding to you, sir,” I responded. “I was merely making a
generalization which seems provable. For instance, I have a friend who
is an expert surgeon. He has been trained in some of the best clinics
and has diplomas from the most reputable medical colleges. He has
learned his profession well, in all its finer, technical points. But he
never received any liberal education. The result is, that he is narrow
in his tastes, caring for nothing which is not flavored by anaesthetics
or redolent of carbolic acid. As there are among his friends those
whose stomachs turn at the mention of an operation or at the whisper
of anaesthetics, he has no way of interesting them on subjects in
which they are interested. He imagines that because all the world is
not poking steel points in ulcers and cancers, it had better be left
alone. The result is, that when you mention the surgeon’s name to the
townsfolk, you will hear words like these: ‘A fine surgeon, but as
cranky and bitter as a hobby-rider.’ No one can get along with him. He
loses business by it. He knows nothing but his profession!”

“Well,” demanded the doctor, “that’s a job big enough for any man with
brains, isn’t it?”

“True,” I responded, “but the truly _educated_ surgeon has not only to
know his tools, his diagnoses, his operating methods, but along with
that knowledge, his final success demands that he be liberally trained
in human nature, that he have at least a faint idea of the subjects in
which other people are interested. A liberal education, added to his
professional education gives him that.”

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

“Well, take my case again, for instance. I am going to take a lot of
studies which are not technically pertinent to sermons or doctrines:
study of Dutch paintings, Italian, Chemistry, Anatomy of the Brain and
Sense Organs, and others which I can’t mention at this time, because
I have not decided just what they will be. Here is what I mean. After
an introductory study of Italian, I shall learn just how the Italians
think. It is good to know that, surely? Then after a brief course in
chemistry, though I shall not care enough about it when I am through
with the experiments, to carry off a test tube, tie it with baby ribbon
and keep it for a souvenir, as some students do, I shall ever after
realize that while I am swearing by theology, others, about me, have
reason for being engrossed in chemical formulas and tests. Each study
that I shall take, and each classroom that I shall visit, will form
opportunities for me to get at the points of view which determine why
Tom differs from Joe and why Joe differs from me. If the college can
do that, Doctor, and not add a single jot to my theological knowledge,
I shall feel more than repaid for the time I spend in it and the money
I pay to it. So that is why I don’t think it either wasted time or an
entirely hopeless situation, Doctor, if a large number of students in
the college do not know why they are there. One thing is certain, they
are getting trained in the other man’s point of view!”

The Doctor, evidently not at all in agreement with my explanation,
after he had pooh-poohed to himself for a minute, thought to change the
subject and for that purpose he said to me,

“I rather pity you, young man. I always did pity ministers. They don’t
seem to do anything substantial; that’s why I don’t go near a church.
It’s all up-in-the-air preaching, and darned little doing. Now, keeping
pullets or mixing a sick draught--why, they are something worth while,
now--but preaching and preachers--um!”

“The other man’s point of view, Doctor,” I laughed, as I mounted my
wheel and started off.

A week later, the Doctor came out of the house, when I stopped at the
well, and as he drew near he shouted,

“I drove over to the college, last Wednesday. What a lazy set of
loafers you’ve got over there, to be sure. I was there in the afternoon
and saw them reading papers, strolling around the campus and playing
all sorts of games. I don’t think they’ll amount to much in the world
if they go on at that rate. They seem so aimless! I heard one fellow,
with turned up trousers and purple socks that would have given light
at night, say to another student, something about throwing books and
professors to the dogs--or some such stuff!”

“Yes,” I admitted, “I hear that every day. I know a good many students
who care little about classes and text books.”

The doctor, evidently gratified with that admission grunted,

“Then what’s the good of the college--to them. Why doesn’t it send them
into the world to be useful?”

“That’s what a good many people say, about us students,” I replied.
“But books and professors and courses of study are only a part of what
a student gets in our college, sir. It’s a very peculiar situation.
I’m older than most of the students, and have had the advantage of a
professional training, and so can look on the college through somewhat
serious eyes. You would be astounded, for instance, at the tremendous
education that the men receive from purely student affairs.”

“Going into the country, when the football team’s won over Princeton,
for instance,” sniffed the Doctor, “and tearing down farm fences! Oh,
yes, a wonderful education in student affairs? Like one of your boys
that came into this village, and in broad daylight went up to the
grocery store, there, on the main street, and deliberately took down
and carried off a four-foot, patent-medicine thermometer, the folks
all the while thinking him to be an agent fellow, come to mend it,
or change it. Oh, yes, a wonderful education those fellows get among
themselves!”

After the old man had frightened one of his pullets back into the rear
of the house, I replied,

“No, I didn’t refer to isolated acts of mischief, Doctor, but to the
student enterprises that create ability. Our college is nothing more
than wheels within wheels. There are professors and classroom studies
for the big, outside wheels, and for the inner wheels, whirling all the
time, are the college newspaper, the college magazine, the athletic
business, the writing and staging of plays, the dramatic clubs, the
musical clubs, the social service enterprises, the political clubs
and the religious work. Why, Doctor, those students conduct all
those things practically without help from outsiders. You would be
astounded at the amount of executive and administrative ability they
demand. The students who run the monthly magazine, for instance, must
be good editors, fair writers, and managers of astuteness, for it has
to pay for itself, at least, and must express literary power. It is
the same with the newspaper. That is a business in itself, yet, it is
managed, financed and edited entirely by students, many of whom find it
difficult to get interested in the routine of the college curriculum.
When you multiply these business and serious activities, you find the
students actually doing profitable and character-forming tasks outside
of the classrooms which few critics of the college take the trouble
to notice. Why, it was only a week ago, that a student came into my
room and had a talk with me about a new college enterprise that seemed
formidable. He was a student who did not care five toothpicks for his
studies. He was in difficulties with his physics course, at the time,
having failed in it twice, and seeming to be letting his third and
last chance for his degree slip past without giving it a thought. The
people on the campus, and the professors in the classrooms appraised
this fellow as a ‘loafer’ and an ‘idler.’ Yet, that morning he came to
me and said that he proposed to start a comic monthly, at ten cents a
copy, himself to be editor-in-chief, and the jokes, poems, pictures,
designs, the securing of advertisement and subscribers, to be under his
general charge and apportioned to willing students. He went off for
two days, at his own expense, secured over a hundred dollars’ worth
of advertising, and only last week had newsboys selling on the campus
a first-class, neatly printed, well-filled, artistically illustrated
comic monthly, which, by this time has its regular staff of student
artists, poets, joke writers, business managers, and board of editors;
it’s a paper which promises to be one of the features of student life.
No, Doctor,” I concluded as I felt of my tires, preparatory to taking
up my journey towards home, “students may seem shiftless, indifferent,
and unenthusiastic on the campus, but when you get behind the laziest
of them you are liable to find that they are giving themselves to
some sort of character-making work,--contrary to the posters which
lead outsiders to think that college life consists of a place where
the student sits in the sun on a fence, smoking a pipe with a leashed
bull-pup at his feet!”

“Say,” called the Doctor, as I fitted the toe clips to my shoes, “my
pullets did a hundred and sixty this week. Laying,--eh?”




_Chapter XXXV. Hot-Popovers and a Cold Watch in the Station. The
Sleigh-load of Talent_


When the winter storms piled the river highway with snowdrifts, I
had to put aside my bicycle and use the railway trains. This made it
necessary for me to leave my home on the Sunday midnight train that I
might be ready for my classes at college, on Monday morning. In that
northern part of New England what storms could grip the land and put
a stop to train traffic and cartage! One of my parishioners showed
me, for my comfort possibly, an actual photograph of a drift of snow
so high that a liberal load of hay on a wagon stood on a level with
it, when a gap was dug through. I had packed fir boughs around the
parsonage cellar wall, and that was soon covered with the drifts;
even the window sills were reached by the snow at last. As for the
crumpled hills surrounding the village, their lonely, hurricane-swept
crests,--with the stick-like birches bending away from the north like
timid creatures afraid to stand up, day by day, against those icy
assaults,--presented a wild, dismal picture of winter’s fury.

My custom was, during those months, to arrive home on the Saturday
afternoon train and immediately set to work splitting the maple blocks
of wood into convenient fire-wood and stacking a week’s supply in the
kitchen wood-box, while my wife held a meeting with the children of the
parish in the parlor. Then on Sunday, I would preach two sermons. I had
to wear my overshoes in the evening on account of the chill in which
the vestry was always wrapped. After this service, my wife would have
the supper table spread with preserved pears, hot pop-overs and cocoa.
We would linger over this meal, the last I should have at home for a
week, and keeping a sharp eye on the clock. At the first announcement
of ten o’clock, the lantern would be lighted and the words of farewell
be given at the door. Then out into the dark misery of the night,
with my lantern flickering my shadow over the houses, and my wife’s
lonesome sigh echoing in my heart, I would creep through the storms
of swirling snow, which wet my hot cheeks, pass over the quiet bridge
to the opposite side of the river and climb up a steep road until the
silent, isolated station was reached. Across the river I could see the
dark outlines of the village, and in the midst of it, a golden point
of light: the light of my home. The train was due at half-past ten,
but it was never on time and so I had long waits. The station-master
left the station dark on Sunday evenings. He gave me a key with which I
unlocked the door and was able to keep warm while waiting. After having
lighted the swinging lamp, I would produce a book and let the slow
minutes pass until the late train screamed around the corner, as if
angry with itself for its slow progress between stations. On the first
sound of the whistle, it would be a wild scramble to quench the light,
lock the door, and rush out to the train before it pulled out from the
station.

An hour later the train would draw into the terminus and leave me
stranded, four miles away from my dormitory. Then I had to cross over
to the hotel, engage one of the rooms and try to sleep till half-past
five the next morning; if sleep were possible with such a screaming
of freight-train whistles, and such a bumping of shifting engines as
prevailed through the small hours of the night.

At eight o’clock the following morning, eyelids leaden with loss of
sleep and my body weakened through lack of rest, and an inadequate
breakfast, I would commence the first of my three Monday morning
classes, and not be free from the intellectual discipline again until
nearly noon, after which I would spend the afternoon in sleep or
recreation.

One day the director of social service, a department of the religious
work done by students, came to me and said,

“Priddy, we’ve got all sorts of concert talent about here. Would your
church care if we should give them an evening’s entertainment?”

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

“But all we shall expect will be our expenses and a good, hot supper.
We can hire a big sleigh and make up quite a party to go over the
hills.”

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

He thought a minute, and then said,

“Why, we’ve got banjo players to spare, club jugglers, a
sleight-of-hand performer, four or five male quartettes, a stringed
orchestra, two readers, and a ventriloquist. Of course, the night we
could give to you would find some of these students unable to go, but
tell me what sort of an entertainment you would like and I’ll see what
we can do for you. We want to make the evenings brighter in some of
these isolated, north country villages. It’s a little bit of social
service that brings its own reward, for the boys like to get out and
have a good country supper!”

He was able, finally, to make up a program which included a reader,
a young professor who would swing flaming clubs, a sleight-of-hand
performer and a male quartette.

On the afternoon appointed, these artists, wrapped up in thick clothes,
appeared in front of a dormitory and were packed into a huge barge on
runners until, including some invited professors and their wives, we
numbered twenty or more.

The four horses, with streamers of brass bells hanging in front of them
jingled over the packed snow roads of the village and finally brought
us into the less used hill roads, which, in places rambled over the
hills until the climb seemed interminable. The snow began to fall and
we plunged down the steep declivities, half blinded by it, but opposing
the storm with jokes, songs and banter.

On a shelf of road, which had been cut from a steep hillside, and which
the winds, unhindered by protecting wall or trees, had stripped of snow
and left glare ice for the sleigh to cross, our runners skidded to
such an angle that we were threatened with an overturn that would have
hurled us down the steep bank, had not some of the students leaped to
the ground, and by sheer strength, aided by the careful control of the
driver, kept the sleigh to the road until we were in safety.

Then as the twilight set in, and there were no sign-posts to guide
us, we stopped at the first house and asked how far we were from the
village. An old woman, dressed in a greasy print wrapper, and drawing
gulps of smoke from a briar pipe, said she guessed we were “nigh four
miles this side of it.” We drove through the storm for a quarter of an
hour more, and then, thinking that we should be coming in sight of the
village, we stopped a man who was going to his barn with milking cans
and repeated our request as to how far we were from the village, and,
as if he had been in league with the old woman with the pipe, a mile
back he said,

“’Bout four mile, I’d say!”

Hopefully, then, we rumbled and scraped down a hill for another half
hour, and then, meeting another sleigh, coming in our direction, our
driver hailed the man at the reins, who was muffled to his ears in a
swathing of crazy-quilt, and shouted,

“How far are we from the village?”

And much to our dismay, a rumbling answer came from the folds of the
crazy-quilt, which we had to interpret as,

“Jes’ four mile!”

Ten minutes, later, however, we had the joy of arriving hungry, cold,
but not without spirit, at the church door, where, under kerosene
lamps, and on white paper table-cloths, was spread a meal of hot
biscuits, hot yellow-eyed beans, hot pea beans, potato salad, hot
kidney beans, dill pickles, pickled beets, four sorts of frosted cake,
luscious lemon pies and coffee.

After the supper, the students went into my church and found a hundred
of the villagers gathered, in spite of the storm. The quartette sang
entrancingly their college jingles. The young professor swung his
flaming clubs, until, when he was in the midst of some complicated
spirals his alcohol-soaked rags burnt out, unexpectedly, and he had
to apologize since he could not go on with his novel act because
his “spirits had given out.” The reader gave, with great effect, a
memorable quarrel between man and wife, and sparkling anecdotes which
would have taken the dullness off a yokel’s heart. Then the star of the
concert, the sleight-of-hand performer began his skilful mysteries.
He made a pencil cling to the palm of his hand, brought flags and
flowers from an empty hat, multiplied a billiard ball into six, wafted
a half dollar into thin air, and, finally, produced a pack of cards, at
the sight of which, I thought my deacons would institute proceedings
of worldliness against me for allowing it, but which, when made to
do the weirdest acts, finally reconciled even the most austere of
them; so much so that one grim Puritan even came forward and held the
pack--after much persuasion--while the man of mystery seemed to change
them without the holder’s knowledge.

At the close of the entertainment, the college delegation, after going,
every one, to the church women and declaring that they had never
eaten a better supper than had been provided, got into the sleigh, the
driver cracked his long whip with a deft explosion for the ears of the
on-looking villagers, and with a hearty yell, they started on their
way down the river road through the storm, and I stood with my wife at
our door until their songs died away among the midnight shadows of the
hills and storm.




_Chapter XXXVI. A Chapter of Sentiment and Literary Atmosphere,
Including the Account of Sanderson, the Procrastinator. How Two Prize
Checks Were Spent. A Parish of Talent_


When came the announcement of Spring, at college, after the lawns and
the paths had dried, and when the evenings were filled with the throaty
gurglings of hopping robins. A sign in front of the Commons announced,
“Class Sing Tonight 7:30.” This is a “Sing;”

At seven o’clock the students gather by classes at four different parts
of the campus: the seniors to sit on their double fence, the juniors to
sit on the steps of the recitation hall, the sophomores to occupy the
commodious steps of the Assembly Hall, and the freshmen to stand near
the library.

Silence!

Suddenly the low, vibrating voices of the seniors fill the air with,
“Harvest Moon.” On its completion, the three lower classes send
snapping hand claps over to the fence.

Silence!

The juniors send across to the seniors the melodious, sentimental song,
“Summer Days and Love, Love, Love!” over the triple trills of which
the high-pitched tenors linger as if they would stop there and sound
those musical half tones until out of breath. Led by the seniors, the
underclassmen repeat the hand-clapping.

Silence!

With a sudden, flank attack, the sophomores, directed by a
shirt-sleeved and very fat student fly into the midst of “Dolly Grey,”
a stirring war ballad, and from the pathos which wells out of the
sentimental passages, one can easily imagine those wild, irresponsible
sophomores crying in harmony with it. Once more the three classes snap
their applause.

Silence!

A longer silence this time, for the freshmen, making their first
appearance in the rôle of class singers--a thick mass of them--cannot
agree with their director as to what the premiere shall be. Soon the
matter is settled. An arm is raised and then--a low rumble that dies
down, followed by three giant laughs from three different points of the
campus. The freshman leader has pitched the tune too low.

“Out with it, Freshies!” comes a mocking, cutting call across from the
sophomores--traditional enemies of the freshmen.

One more try, and with the effect of an aeroplane getting its flight
slowly, hesitatingly, the freshman song at last rises to a mighty,
boyish, exultant rendering of “Old Black Joe!” for they dare not trust
themselves with a recent melody.

After the songs, the cheers! the class cheers!

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

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

Then the seniors give a heartier one for the freshmen, and those boys
almost split the heavens with their yellings.

Next the juniors make the rounds of the classes, with the same response
of applause, save that their cheer for the seniors gets but scant and
dignified applause, for the seniors must not be too boyish!

Then the sophomores and the freshmen have their turn and the cheering
is over.

Silence. The night is deepening, and one hardly stirs. Four huge masses
of shadow move in the direction of the campus centre. Then one hears a
martial, drill-sergeant’s “Left, left, left!” as the classes catch the
step. It is so arranged that, without a halt, the four classes merge
into one mass in the middle of the green.

Silence again. Not a sound is heard, until the college song-leader
hums a pitch. Then the Alma Mater hymn goes up with all the thrilling
reverence in it of a song of love sung to the college mother. If one
were near the singers, it would be possible to see, how, when the song
deepens in theme, the sophomore unconsciously throws his arm over the
shoulder of the freshman, and the senior throws his over the shoulder
of the junior: all brothers as the melody unfolds itself.

The hymn ended, the cheer-leader moves to the side of the song-leader,
says a few words, and then, as he takes the position of a
prize-fighter, on guard, with his fist extended, he pulls out from the
disciplined throats, a snappy, thundering crash of a college cheer. It
is over. The crowd thins out over the star-lighted campus. Spring has
come!

I was amazed, that year, at the amount of personal supervision the
professors gave to the students, out of hours, amidst such large
classes as they were called upon to instruct. It had been drilled into
my mind at Evangelical University that only in the small college is it
possible for the professors to “get next” to the student in a wise,
helpful manner. So that when I came into the centre of the college
life, in all its complexity, diversity and confusion, I actually
expected to see the professors deliver their lectures, and then coldly
leave us to ourselves, withdrawing themselves from the student life
with academic aloofness.

But on Tuesday evenings the faculty were “at home” and welcomed such
student visitors as cared to accept the courteous hospitality of
their cheerful homes. After classes, and in their offices at certain
hours, we could go to our teachers and be sure of receiving their most
thorough attention on the matter in mind. Then, too, the professors
were always eagerly seeking to align themselves to our life: to enter
with us into the profitable ventures of a social, inspiring nature.
Thus it came about that they served on athletic committees, religious
boards, literary and social programs. It was because they possessed
this spirit of fellowship with their students, that I was enabled to
venture into a new world of opportunity. It was in this wise.

I had been spending the largest proportion of my time in literary
composition, for my wife, my sermon critic, had found that in my pulpit
address I needed rhetorical clearness, so I determined to discipline
myself to that end. When the English professor gave out exercises, like
editorials, descriptions, book reviews, or short stories, I resolved
to put the burden of my time in such writings with no other thought
than to remedy my pulpit faults. When some of these exercises were
returned, after examination by the professor, I found red pencil notes,
suggesting that this or that be submitted for publication in the
college periodicals. These red pencil suggestions were common in the
class, and gave great inspiration to the other students, as they gave
inspiration to me. One day, when I arrived late at class, I found the
professor reading aloud a description I had written. This was followed
by a request for a conference in the teacher’s office.

“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 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 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
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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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?”

“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 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 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 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 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 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,

“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 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.

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 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.




_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.

“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!”

“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.

[Illustration: SO ARM IN ARM THE BLIND STUDENT AND I WALKED]

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 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 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’, 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 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.

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 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 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!”




_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 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 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.”

“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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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.’”

“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 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 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, 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.”

“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 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 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 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 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 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.




_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, 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 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 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
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!”

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 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!”

“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.




_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. “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.

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 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 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 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. 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. 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.

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.”

“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 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 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, 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, “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 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.

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 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, 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:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.