Chapters 12
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1 00 - Prefatory Note 1:30
Prefatory Note. My purpose in writing these recollections is set forth with sufficient clearness in the pages that follow. With a few exceptions, easily identified by the form in which they appear, the experiences are personal and actually occurred as they are set down to the best of my recollection. I kept no notes, and, save for references and allusions in occasional letters, I have had to depend entirely upon my memory. Only one story was made up for the occasion, and that combines several actual incidents. I hope that this book may serve to interest those who read it in The Life of the Average Missionary on the Western Frontier, a life of mingled work and pleasure, joy and pathos, hardship and fun.
Cyrus Townsend Brady, Philadelphia, June 1900 End of prefatory note.
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2 01 - Chapter 1 19:18
Once upon a time, the dean of an episcopal cathedral in a far western state asked a young man, who had been a cadet midshipman in the United States Navy and was then a railroad official, to join a confirmation class he was organizing. The dean and the young man boarded in the same house at the time, the dean in the parlor, the young man in the garret, and a great friendship had arisen between them. The young man, whose antecedents were all Presbyterian, did not wish to be confirmed. When the dean pressed him, he replied firmly in the negative, and when the dean withdrew, he dismissed the subject from his thoughts. The very next day, he walked into the dean's office in the evening and announced his intention of joining the class.
He had given the matter no thought in the interim, and knew not until long after that, the dean and some good friends of his, who happened to like the young man, had made his confirmation the subject of special prayer. The dean is dead now, but the young man will never forget him. He was a great-hearted, manly, Christian man, Able, devoted, hard-working, and so beloved by all who came in contact with him, that the paper said of him, after he entered into life, what Motley said of William the Silent, When he died, the little children cried in the streets, and the words were exactly true. In due course, after his confirmation, the young man was moved by that which he cannot explain to study for the ministry.
He was very busily employed during the day in a responsible position in the general office of one of the great railroad systems of the world, and the necessity of supporting his family constrained him to continue his work. But he found time early in the morning, during the noon hours, Going to and from work, and late in the night, to prosecute his studies so successfully that by and by he was ordained deacon and appointed assistant minister to the overworked dean in the cathedral. The first and only duty that devolved upon him for some time was the attending of funerals. All the unattached Episcopalians in the city who wanted to be married, or buried, or helped, naturally came to the cathedral.
The winter was very severe, and there were, I think, thirteen funerals in fifteen days, most of which the assistant conducted. Life in the ministry seemed to be made up of nothing but attending funerals, and the young man, who had known but little sorrow and grief at that time, nearly broke down under the strain caused by the suffering he witnessed and shared, until the dean came to his rescue and took the funerals himself. The cathedral had a large staff of honorary clergy on the rolls, who were all busy with their other duties in the diocese, and were rarely there. The bishop, one of the best and sweetest of men, to whom this minister owes more than he can say, was very fond of referring to the cathedral clergy.
Inasmuch as I was usually the only one visibly present, the people, and especially the other clergymen, dropped into the habit of referring to me alone as the Cathedral clergy. In such phrases as this, we saw the Cathedral clergy this morning. He was looking cheerful and happy. I have never filled so exalted a position since then, nor do I ever expect to be so much of anything as I was when I was the whole cathedral clergy myself. The bishop, of course, like every other Western bishop, was very hard-pressed for men. He always had a half-dozen places clamoring for services, with no money to pay for them, and no men to take them, even if there had been money. So he got into the habit, naturally, of asking the dean to detail one of his staff to go out to various places on Sundays to conduct services.
The dean did not like it much, but he complied like the loyal churchman he was, and one of my first details was to a little struggling church for colored people. I had written a few sermons for similar visitations, and for the Friday night congregations of the cathedral, but due notice of this assignment having been given me, I determined to extemporize. I did not have any very great confidence in my ability to do so, for the only time I had ever tried to speak without notes had been at a sympathetic dinner, which the gun crew of which I was captain while at the United States Naval Academy had given me on the occasion of my being deprived of my exalted cadet rank for some boyish prank. I had commenced on that occasion in a style worthy of Pericles, and had lasted for about three sentences, whereupon I sat down, collapsed, rather, amid friendly cheers and laughter.
The dean was a most fluent and easy extemporaneous speaker, and he encouraged me to attempt it. So I resolved to try it, unworthy thought, upon the colored brethren. The subject I selected was Belshazzar. I find it is a popular theme with youthful speakers, exactly why I do not know. Possibly because it is supposed to be easy. I found it extremely hard. I prepared the sermon with the greatest care, shutting myself up in my study for days beforehand, and preaching it over and over again to imaginary congregations with great effect. At last, the hour of service arrived. The little church, since grown into a strong, hard-working parish, was at that time in a very dilapidated condition. It had a boy choir, vested mostly in blue cassocks, with two acolytes in red ones, and one lone colored brother and myself in black.
The altar and other hangings belonged to different sets, and the color scheme was striking, not to say bizarre. It was a ritualistic church at that time, and they did a great many things to which I was not accustomed, and which greatly disconcerted me. We managed to get through the service, however, in some fashion, and I have no doubt I disconcerted them as much as they did me when the time came for the sermon. As I stepped to the front of the chancel on that hot August night, to address my perspiring little congregation, who should come into the chapel but the chief examiner of the diocese, a man whom personally we all loved, but whom officially we feared above all other men, for the severity with which he insisted upon a literal compliance with the rigid requirements before he passed a candidate whom he examined for the priesthood.
He was a tall, thin man, with white hair and a keen, though kindly, blue eye. He came solemnly into the church, sat down in a front pew, folded his arms, and fixed his eye upon me. I returned his stare with agonized interest. This was not trying it on the colored brethren at all. There was a long, dreadful pause. Finally, I opened my mouth desperately and swallowed a gnat. I moved to reconsider, but the motion was lost. There was a violent coughing spell, in which my carefully prepared sermon on Belshazzar was shattered into fragments. When I recovered my composure—no, I never did recover my composure—but when I stopped coughing, abandoning the gnat to his fate, I had no sermon. I explained the fact to the congregation, something in this fashion.
Dearly beloved brethren, I have forgotten the sermon which I prepared. I beg to assure you that I did prepare one, and instead of that sermon I will tell you my experience in the Johnstown flood, which I proceeded to do with great outward unction but inward misery. The cathedral clergy felt very small indeed that night. What the moral and spiritual effect of that discourse was, I never learned, but I never heard the last of that effort, and I am sometimes reminded by my brethren, especially the chief examiner, of the famous sermon I preached on the Johnstown flood. I would walk around the block to avoid him when I saw him coming for some time after that. Among the duties devolved upon me at the cathedral was that of daily visiting a hospital nearby.
In the eye and ear department there was a little old woman, wife to one of those hard-working heroic Methodists, who helped to build up the kingdom of God on the distant frontier. She had been blind for a dozen years. A hunting party, in which there was an eminent oculist, happened to stop at the rude lodge where she dwelt with her husband and children. The kindly physician, who made an examination of her eyes, determined that a cure was possible, and had resolved to effect it himself, hence the presence of the old woman in the hospital. I had visited her many times during her long stay, and we became very well acquainted. This, of which I speak, was the first visit I made her after an absence on a long vacation.
She was in a little room about ten feet square. Opposite this room, and separated from it by a narrow corridor, was another room, and the doors of both were open. When I entered, she was seated, with her eyes shaded. She looked at me, Actually looked at me as I stood in the door, and when I spoke she recognized my voice. Oh, she said, the operation was performed some time ago, and it is a success. I can see. I can see. She fairly beamed with a chastened, humble sort of joy, as she continued, I'm going back home soon. I am going back to look into the face of that brave old man, my husband, who has stood by me in my days of darkness. I am going to clasp in my arms another younger man, who was a little boy when I saw him last.
I am going to press to my heart a young girl, they tell me she is beautiful, who was a baby at my breast when the light went out. I am so grateful to God, that, whereas I was blind, now I see, that I thank Him every day, every hour, every moment even. I am glad you are come. We will thank Him together, first I, and then you. And so we knelt down in the little room in the hospital, in the stillness of that sunny morning, that once blind old woman and I. The words which came from her lips were rude and simple, but they came from an honest, grateful heart, and they had a power and sweetness all their own. I have heard and read many prayers, but not many like that one. It was a most humble young man who knelt by her side, and when she had finished her own fervent outpouring of gratitude, he joined his own feeble words to her expressions.
And then there was a little silence in the room. It was broken by the sound of a great tearing sob, like that which comes from the breast of a strong man unused to weeping. We looked up from our knees, and there in the doorway, with his arms extended in that hopeless, helpless gesture, peculiar to the newly blind, was a splendid, stalwart-looking man, tears running down his cheeks. Oh, sir, he said with a quivering voice, you've thanked God for having given that woman back her sight. Won't you pray to him for me, for he has forever taken mine. My poor friend learned after a while that there is a country where the eyes of the blind are opened. There was a little baby in the family of the young deacon.
In fact, there has almost always been a little baby in his family. I remember, to anticipate a little, that on one occasion a sagacious neighbor of mine and I were exchanging felicitations over the recent arrival in each of our households of another baby, not the first one in either case by any means. "'I will tell you what it is, Mr. Brady,' he remarked sagely. "'I love my children. I am proud of them. I wouldn't take a million dollars for a single one of them. But I wouldn't give fifteen cents for another.' I entirely agreed with him.
Since the above was first published, still another baby has arrived in my family. I have refused many offers of fifteen cents for him. He is not in the market. The price of babies has risen.
Well, to return to this particular baby, one day when I was writing a sermon, at which time, of course, I was very desirous of not being disturbed, he came tiptoeing into the room, remarking in his childish way, "'I won't sturb you, Papa,' and proceeded to clasp his hands around my left hand, lying on the desk, resting his little curly head upon my arm. I wrote on and on in silence. Presently, the hold on my arm relaxed, the little body slipped gently down to the floor, the hands shifted themselves from my arm to my foot, he laid his head upon it, and went fast asleep. There was a little clock on my desk at the time. The room was very still, and its ticking was distinctly audible in the perfect quiet.
As I watched the little lad, the clock suddenly stopped. We know, whose duty it is to wind them, that clocks often stop, but I never remember to have heard one stop before or since. The busy ticking died away, and left no sound to break the silence. I looked down at the frail life beginning at my feet, and thought of the thousands and thousands of lives, young and old, ticked out with each recurring minute, of the stopped clocks, a moment since. Quick with life. The lad lay very still. In panic terror I awakened him. The sermon I had been writing was on the fifth commandment, a lesson to children. I tore it up then and there, in the sight of his innocence, and made it a lesson to fathers instead, that they might be worthy of the honor commanded from the children, and I call it the boy sermon to this day.
When he could barely walk, I took him to the cathedral one afternoon, when I went back for something I had left after morning service. I left him down in the nave by the door, while I walked up to the chancel. I was busy there for a few moments, and when I turned to go out, he had advanced halfway up the middle aisle, and was standing where the declining sun Streaming through the great painted west window, threw a golden light around his curly head, and a tiny little object he was in that great quiet church. It was very still. He was looking about him in every direction in the most curious and eager way. To my fond fancy, he seemed a little angel, as he said in this sweet, childish treble, which echoed and re-echoed beneath the vaulted Gothic roof, these words, Papa!
Where's Jesus? Where's Jesus? He had been told that the church was the home of the Saviour, and in his first visit he was looking for him. Seek, seek, my boy, and ye shall find, please God, and every other boy and girl that seeketh likewise. That baby is quite grown up now. There are no curls on his head. In no way does he resemble, no, not in the faintest particular, an angel. The other day, when I rode off to the wars, he astonished me with this request. He was truculently patriotic during the exciting period. "'Father, if you get wounded, don't forget to bring me the bullet that knocks you out as a souvenir for my collection.' I promised faithfully, but fortune was kinder to me than to him, and he still lacks that souvenir for his collection.
Talking about children reminds me of a retort courteous, and adequate as well, of a little girl whom I baptized long afterwards in a small town on the border of the Indian territory. Her father was a cattleman. It would be no extravagance to say that the cattle upon a thousand hills were his if it were not for the fact that there were no hills on his mighty ranch. Each cattle-owner in that country has a different brand with which his cattle are marked, and by which he identifies them when the great round-ups occur. The mavericks, young cattle born on the range, which have not been marked, belong to the first man who can get his branding-iron on them. I could only make that town on a week-day, and arrangements had been made for the baptism in the morning.
The young miss, about six years of age, had just started to the public school, and she had to remain away from one session for the baptism. In our service, we sign those who are baptized with the sign of the cross. When she returned to school, the children pressed her with hard questions, desiring to know what that man with the nightgown on had done to her, and if she was now any different from what she was before. She tried to tell them that she had been made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, but did not very well succeed in expressing the situation. So they gathered about her with the unconscious cruelty of children, and pushed her over against the theological wall, so to speak.
Finally, when she had exhausted every other effort, she turned on them in this way, her eyes flashing through her tears. "'Well,' she said, lasping into the vernacular, "'I will tell you. I was a little maverick before, and the man put Jesus' brand on my forehead, and when he sees me running wild on the prairie, he will know that I am his little girl.'" The answer was eminently satisfactory to the small audience. They understood her perfectly, and the profoundest theologian could scarce have expressed it better.
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3 02 - Chapter 2 20:17
I have told you about my first sermon. My first baptism was in this wise, During the absence of the dean on his vacation, an undertaker, whose acquaintance I enjoyed through my numerous funerals, asked me if I would go on Sunday afternoon down to the bottoms, i.e., lowlands, on the banks of the river, occupied by a few squatter huts, and the resort, especially on Sunday afternoons, of men and women of the baser sort, to conduct a funeral for a dead, gypsy baby. The Gypsies were English, and claimed to be members of the established church. I agreed to do so, of course, and when I drove to the rude encampment of the swarthy nomads on Sunday afternoon, they were not poor, and had provided carriages.
I was astonished to find it the center of perhaps five hundred people. An enterprising reporter had made up a story about the little dead infant which had appeared in the Sunday morning paper with this result. It was a very jocular and lively crowd of men and women, the latter being from the worst quarters of the city. There was talking, laughing, and singing. Some negroes were playing on banjos, and altogether the assemblage was more like a low-class picnic than anything else. The gypsies were gathered in their wagons and tents, sullenly confronting the crowd. Under the trees in front of one tent, in a little coffin, lay the dead baby. I slipped behind a wagon, not escaping observation thereby, and put on my vestments, an act which excited some rude and jesting comment.
I then stepped to the side of the coffin, faced the crowd nervously, asked them to be silent, and began the service, which I continued to read, in spite of much noise and disturbance. At the usual time, I made the customary announcement that the remainder of the office would be set at the graveside. As I turned, one of the women stopped me with the statement that they had several babies to be baptized. I urged that they be brought to the church, but they refused. They were here today, and tomorrow gone they knew not where. They explained it all in their dramatic way. If I would baptize the babies, then all right. If not... And they closed their sentences with characteristic shrugs of their shoulders.
I had made no preparation for baptism, but I decided on my course at once. They brought me an old chair without a back, and I placed upon it, bottom upward, a horse-bucket. I borrowed a newspaper from one of the now deeply interested crowd, and tucked it around the bucket to cover its unsightliness as much as possible. On the bucket was placed an old tin pan filled with turbid water from the river. The parents were to be sponsors, but as none of them could read English, I asked if someone would not read the responses for them, and finally, after much hesitation, one of the hackmen and a woman of the town volunteered. The poor creature came forward, blushing painfully under her paint, and took her place beside the hackmen.
Fortunately, I had an extra prayer-book in my pocket, so we began the service. The Negroes had stopped their banjo playing, and the crowd, which had swelled to about a thousand people now, was very quiet and very interested. The first baby brought to me was a little black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy infant, about three weeks old. When I asked the name of this child, the father said, Major. Major what? I asked. Just Major, he replied, and so, with an anxious thought toward the old church injunction that children should be named for some scriptural character, whose virtues they could emulate, the baby was duly christened Major. Four others followed in quick succession. When the ceremony was over, I made the previous announcement again, and was astonished when the mother of Major said she had not been churched, and would I mind doing it.
I suppose there are very few clergymen in the United States who have used the whole of the office for the churching of women after childbirth in public, but with the assistance of the poor woman who had read the responses in the baptism, and who now stood by her humble, gypsy sister with her arm around her waist and with her eyes filled with tears, we finished that service also. Is there anything more? I asked. Yes," said the mother of the dead baby, coming forward with the little body, which she lifted from its coffin, clasped in her arms. Won't you baptize this one? I gently told her that I could not baptize the dead, that it was neither necessary nor right. But she would not be convinced. She begged and implored, and at last fell on her knees before me, and held up in front of me the still white little bundle of what had been humanity, and agonizingly besought me, in the terrified accents of guilt and despair, to perform the, to it, useless service.
I explained to her as well as a young man could the situation, told her the baby was all right, and that even though she had failed in her duty, God would certainly accept her evident contrition. Friends took the baby away at last, and raised her up, and then I turned and faced the awestruck crowd again. The noise had died away, the laughter and jests were still, the rude speech was hushed. Tears were streaming down the hollow cheeks of the wretched women. I spoke to them that time out of a full heart. It was only the second time that I tried to speak without notes, and this time there was no hesitation. God helped me. They had listened to me say the Lord's prayer in silence in the service before, and when I finished my rebarks, and invited them again, and knelt down in the dust, most of those nearby knelt with me, and the rest bowed their heads reverently, while many joined falteringly at first, but more strongly as the sentences came in the prayer of Our Father, who art in heaven.
They opened respectfully before us as we took the baby and walked to the carriages. Some of the women laid their hands gently on my surplice, as, with bowed head, I walked past them. I turned about as we drove off, and saw them break up into little groups and walk quietly and thoughtfully away in different directions, after such a Sunday afternoon, as probably many of them had never spent before. After the services at the cemetery, the chief of the Gypsy tribe, a rather distinguished-looking old man, put into my hand a handful of money, coins, and bills. I refused to take it, saying we made no charge for services of that kind, but he pressed it upon me with the remark that I could use it for some woman in trouble.
On those terms, I received it. That night, I had a visitor. It was the wretched woman who had read the responses. That brief hour in which only as the voice of another she had assumed the responsibilities of a woman and a Christian, had recalled her to a sense of her lost innocence and purity, and she had resolved, by God's help, to begin again. It was a true baptism, a regeneration indeed. The gipsy's money started her upon a new way, which she pursued unswervingly as long as I knew her. May her feet tread the paths of righteousness until the end. The service was a great strain on the nervous system of the young man, but the baptism reminds me of another that I administered long after under different circumstances.
It was in the home of a family somewhat indifferent to religion in a very far western town. I was very anxious, as always, to impress them with the beauty and simplicity of the service, and I did my best in its rendition. The person I baptized was a little boy about five years old. After I had finished, there was a pause which the lad broke, looking up into my face, and delivering this remark with a solemnity and earnestness which only added to my consternation, Mr. Brady, I baptized my dog this morning to see how he'd like it. I always felt that the hoped-for effect of that service was dissipated by that artless remark. To go back, indeed, I have gone, and shall go, wheresoever my memory leads me, without regard to chronology in these rambling reminiscences.
Shortly after the first baptism, the dean, the bishop, and the honorary canons went to the general convention, and left me in charge of the cathedral. It was a noble position, and I enjoyed it extremely. As each Sunday came around, the temptation to preach without notes would recur with added force, and finally on the last Sunday before they all came back, I resolved to try it once more. Undeterred by my previous experience, I fixed upon Belshazzar again as a fitting subject. He fascinates me. He does yet. I prepared the sermon in the same manner as before, and when the eventful Sunday night came, I actually got through with it, at a break-neck pace, and in a very nervous and frightened way, I admit.
But I did not break down, nor stop to give the bewildered people time to breathe, nor even to consider the various points of the sermon, which was doubtless an advantage for me, and for them as well. The next Sunday, as all the clergy returned at the same time, from doing everything myself, I dropped to the position of a factotum, whose only office was to hand the alms-basin. Next Monday I told the bishop that I would resign my position and go out and be a missionary, a course which he had been urging upon me. Such offers were rare, and he allotted me three mission stations, with an alacrity only equalled by that with which I accepted the position. That was the beginning of a missionary life which took me into five western states and territories, and lasted many years.
The following Sunday I began my tour of duty. I preached on Belshazzar in the morning at one place, and made him do duty at night at another. On Tuesday, I went to the third place, and, intoxicated with my previous success, I used the overworked Assyrian once more. After the service, a pleasant-looking man stepped up to me, and we shook hands whereupon he said, "'That's a very fine sermon of yours.' I was, of course, greatly pleased, and expressed the hope that it had done him good. Yes, he said. It has. I thought it was a fine sermon when I heard it first two Sundays ago. I liked it better when I heard it last Sunday morning, and as I happened to go to the town where you preached on Sunday night, I heard it there also.
When I made this town, I am a traveling man, and saw in the paper that you were to preach, I thought I would come round and see if I could not meet my old friend. I have liked it better each time I heard it. He added, with a merry twinkle in his eye, "'won't you let me know when and where you are going to preach it again?' Imagine my horror and shame and confusion. I confessed to him, frankly, that Belshazzar was not only my best, but my only extemporaneous sermon, and we became great friends. I have hardly ever dared, however, to use that discourse sense, for something always happens when my thoughts turn on Belshazzar." Some years later, when I was rector of a beautiful parish church in a western state, I preached about him under the caption of, The Story of a Bad Boy, which he certainly was.
During the services, we had a vivid illustration of what bad boys were, for the rectory adjoining the church was robbed of everything movable and valuable, except the children, and on that same night, during the service, one of the congregation had a fit in the back of the church. I wondered if by any chance it might be my travelling friend who was hearing the sermon for the fifth time. And that reminds me of an afflicted woman who went for treatment to an eminent but tactless specialist, who brutally told her, in a moment of unworthy petulance, that she had an incurable disease, which would probably in the end destroy her mind. She indignantly repelled his assertions, and vowed that she would show him by her visits from time to time that her sanity was not impaired.
She was a brilliant and able woman, highly cultured, and possessed of a remarkable will-power. Her life after that was one long duel between her will and the recurring attacks of the dread disease. She visited that grim physician as long as she was able to do so, and he had the bitter satisfaction of gradually seeing the realization of his frightful prophecy. After the last attack, before her mind entirely gave way, she begged piteously to be taken to that doctor again, to let him see that she was still the master. And when the final break came, she clung tenaciously to that dominant idea, and all her madness culminated in the expression again and again of that desire, until death restored the unfortunate to her reason once more.
As to that ruthless prophet, he was deservedly held without honor in his own country among those who knew the circumstances. I did not attempt sermons without notes for a long time, and when I did, I had many bitter experiences before I learned to keep my brain a few sentences ahead of my lips while standing on my feet. I have frequently piled up possible notwithstandings, i.e., notwithstanding this, notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding the other, and then have forgotten just what was to happen, notwithstanding. Other stations were added to my first mission field out on the frontiers of the diocese until I had a large amount of territory to cover. I held services at one place Sunday morning, Drove twelve miles and a half to another place for afternoon services, and returned to the first place for service at night, taking the other towns on weeknights.
In a year and nine months, I never missed a service. I rode or drove long distances in every conceivable sort of weather, under burning suns, through tropic rains, in the midst of blinding dust-storms, in winter's blasting cold, and finally, on one notable occasion, in a frightful blizzard. We had the usual service on Sunday morning, very slimly attended, and after a hasty dinner, I started for the South. I had two rough, wiry broncos, The horse par excellence for missionary work, as well as a splendid subject for missionary effort. A sleigh and a companion. The thermometer had fallen to 18 below zero. The road lay due south, down a valley through which the wind drove with terrific force. A light snow was beginning to fall as we started out, much against the wise counsels of everybody, but I was young and foolish, and did not take heed.
We two men tucked into the sleigh between us a little schoolmistress who had to go to the next town to see a very sick mother. Going down with the wind and snow on our backs was not so bad, and we reached the church at the usual hour. Two or three men had braved the storm on the chance that I might come, as I had never failed, though they did not expect me, and so in the intensely cold church, which it was impossible to heat, with all our winter wrappings on, we knelt down and said the litany together. Then we got a bite to eat, and the horses having been baited and rubbed down, we started again, in spite of the remonstrances of our friends. It was foolish pride, perhaps, but I determined not to miss a single service on that day, if possible.
Facing the storm, which had risen and was in the height of its fury, was simply awful. I was actually wearing summer underclothing at the time, my missionary box from the east not yet having arrived, and I thought I should die. Had I not been originally one of the most robust of men, I hardly see how I could have survived the exposure of that day and the rest of the winter, but my early training stood me in good stead. My companion utterly gave way, and finally sank down in the sleigh under the buffalo robes, where I continuously kicked him to keep him from going to sleep. I had a scarf called a Nubia wrapped around my face, Covering it all except the leeward eye, out of which I was continually obliged to brush the frozen snow.
My breath froze on the wool, of course, and I thrust my handkerchief between the scarf and my face until the handkerchief froze as well. Then I bethought me of a little prayer-book, which I carried in the breast-pocket of my ulster. I opened it in the middle, and laid it across my nose, under the scarf, making a little penthouse, through which I could breathe. I tried to keep the way by watching the telegraph-poles, but very soon lost sight of them in the whirling storm. The reins lay loose in my benumbed hands. The faithful Broncos, however, left to their own devices, toiled slowly along in the face of the mad rush of the wind and the blinding drive of the freezing snow over the prairie. Presently I lost all idea of the way.
I think I had sense enough to keep the horses' heads to the storm, but that was all, and I was too cold and too much benumbed to remember anything. All that I could think of was to keep up my rhythmical kicking of the man at my feet. After a long time—it seemed to me ages of such agony as I never want to endure again—the horses stopped at their stable doors. It was dark night by this time. The stablemen were greatly surprised to see us, as they never dreamed we would attempt the journey. My companion was hastily taken to his house, and I was assisted to my own, which fortunately was not very far away. Some of the vestrymen had come down to the rectory to see if I had returned, and they were waiting in great anxiety for my arrival.
Before I fully realized the extent to which I was knocked out by the hardships of the day, I insisted upon taking the little handful of men over to the church. We lighted the lamps and went through the litany together again. It was foolish, of course, but somehow it is the only act of folly in my life upon which I look back with pleasure. Ours was the only church in town that night to have services. Of course, the papers were full of it, and the next time I had services, what a congregation greeted me. I was rather badly frozen up, but neither my companions nor I sustained any serious injury.
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4 03 - Chapter 3 19:20
If the weather, however, did not put a stop to the services, it sometimes played havoc with those necessary concomitants of religious life in the far west known as church sociables. On one occasion, in one of my missions, we had made elaborate preparations for a great crowd, which was kept at home by a heavy rain. A few of us, who had braved the storm, were seated in great discomfort in the parlour, expressing our opinions with the freedom we all use in like circumstances. A small daughter of the house, who had been an interested listener, suddenly remarked, in a pause in the conversation, Now, you're all mad at God because it's raining. Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings My first sexton was a most curious-looking individual, who was of the Dunkard persuasion, and rejoiced under the name of Malachi Yant.
He was a short squat man, with dust-colored hair which stood out from his head like the fabulous pictures of the Circassian girl in the circus poster. In nothing else, however, did he resemble a circassian. He was dust-colored all over, and gave one the impression that if he were suddenly shaken, the dust would radiate from him as water is showered from a dog after a plunge in the river, especially from that broom-like head of hair. When he was not serving the church, he was a sort of amateur butcher. I went to call on him one morning, soon after my arrival. His wife met me at the door and told me that I would find him in the backyard. He was busy. As I turned to seek him, he came around the corner of the house.
He was a frightful spectacle, all covered with blood and animal debris, and smelt vilely. I started back in horror. "'What have you been doing?' I asked. "'I've been killing hogs,' he said slowly. "'Ain't you ever seen a hog killed?' he asked with some scorn. Unfortunately, I never had. and I could see that my ignorance caused me to fall visibly in his estimation. The next Sunday, one of the women of the parish asked him how he liked the new minister. "'I don't like him at all,' answered Malachi grimly. "'He ain't had no experience whatsoever. He ain't never seen a hog killed.'" Speaking of hogs reminds me of a long railroad journey I took, during which I became very much interested in a conversation with the man who sat opposite me in the crowded car.
I found he was an authority on the hog cholera. The disease is not romantic, but when it sweeps away in a few days every cent you have on earth, including what you have borrowed and invested in pork on the hoof, it becomes tragic. I discussed the matter with him for several hours, and learned a great deal about the insidious disease. We both got off at the same town, and I invited him to come up to the church that night and join in the services. Good gosh," he said, looking me over. I wore my ordinary brown clothes, and was covered with dust as usual. Are you a preacher? I try to be, in a small way, I answered, smiling. Well, I'll be hanged, he replied, in great astonishment. I took you for a farmer.
What did you want to know all that about hog cholera for? He came to the service, however, and afterwards became one of my right-hand men in another mission. What I had learned about hog cholera proved to be of great value on several occasions when I was the guest of some of my farmer friends. When I reached a certain town on the border, I always found the church beautifully clean, the fires lighted, the lamps filled, and everything in good order. A faithful woman attended to these things, but on one occasion I found that nothing had been done. I fixed things up as well as I could alone, and after the service, I went over to her house to find out what was the matter. Her absence was easily explained.
She had sustained a serious injury some time before, and that afternoon an operation had been performed upon her. She was a daughter of the king. When I came into the room, she was lying very white and weak upon the bed. She whispered to me to turn down the cover a little. I did so, and there, on the breast of her night robe, was pinned the little silver cross of the Order. She had suffered agonies, uncomplainingly, I was told, and I understood her when she whispered, I am wearing it, and bearing it as well. They told me she had gone to sleep under the ether with her hand clasped around the little cross. Oh, those daughters of the king, how they proved their right to bear that name. I rode forty miles one day to make a little town when I was archdeacon of another diocese to bury one of them.
I had just come from the funeral of the bishop in the cathedral. There were the sweetest music, the loveliest flowers, the white-robed clergy, bishops of the church, and great crowds of people who had loved the dead bishop as children love a father, and everything had been done to do honor to the memory of that great man who had been taken away from us. Here in this little town was a humble cottage, half dug-out, half log cabin. The winter and the spring had been one of the hardest through which the diocese had ever passed, and the blighting hand of poverty and distress had simply deprived the people of everything except the barest and rudest necessities of life. They were, many of them, actually in want.
The woman who died was a daughter of the king. The five or six members of the order who formed the chapter in the village had done their best for her. They had gathered somewhere a little pitiful bunch of ragged flowers, which they had put upon her breast, where she was laid in the rude pine-coffin. And with the harsh voices of those whose lives are spent in hard toil, they sang and chanted the service. It was the same service, and by chance some of the same hymns which had been used so splendidly for the great bishop. The rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is the maker of them all. Man could do no more for the one than for the other. The feeble cry of a new-born life in the next room sadly interrupted me as I read the service.
I have often wondered if there was not some deeper meaning than we dream of in that scriptural verse which says, Notwithstanding, she shall be saved in child-bearing. There were no carriages there. They were all so poor that we walked to the little cemetery, a straggling procession over the bleak prairie, the men carrying the coffin on their shoulders. During the service, as the women sat around me, I noticed their feet thrust out from beneath the frayed borders of their well-worn dresses, and through their broken shoes I could see that some of them on that bitter cold day had no stockings on. Yet, when the chapters of the order sent up their contributions to pay the salary of a new missionary, as their memorial to the memory of the beloved bishop, This little chapter of poverty and care was remarkable for the amount of its gifts.
Truly from those who have not, more is to be received than from those who have. There were several hundred daughters of the king in that diocese who had agreed to take ten cents, and so use it as to increase it to a dollar, more or less, which was to be sent to the secretary to be used for the salary of a missionary for the next year. The amount which would keep a missionary in the field for a year, in connection with the contributions he would receive from the people among whom he worked, was only three hundred dollars. As everywhere, the missionaries were poorly paid. They more than raised this amount, and they earned it, most of them, in very peculiar ways. One woman, a graduate of one of the noted eastern colleges, whose husband was trying to weather a temporary financial storm, a frequent occupation with business men out there, was at her wit's end to know what to do with her ten cents, until her husband told her one day that he had a sick pig on his farm, which he would give her for missionary purposes if she could do anything with it.
Some people never give anything but sick pigs for missions, by the way, though this man was not of that kind. His wife had some little knowledge of medicine and anatomy, and a great deal of common sense. She studied the pig and accurately diagnosed his case. Through the kindness of a local druggist, she so brilliantly invested her ten cents in medicine, and so successfully treated the sick porker, that he not only got well, but through her scientific dieting, became the largest and finest of the drove, and sold in the end for a very good price indeed, so that she had the honor of sending in the largest contribution to the missionary's salary. She told me she had become so much attached to the animal, during the course of treatment, that it was with poignant regret she saw him led away to be slaughtered.
It was a pure case of applied science. Speaking of college women reminds me of another who had married a young man, well-educated and charming, who had come from the East to make his fortune on a farm. It requires a peculiar talent to be a good farmer, and much intellectuality to grasp the details and learn the methods. I found out that it was a deep subject the first time I took the plough handles from the young boy who was guiding them with one hand. I discovered that it was not as easy as it looked, for I ploughed that furrow by main strength. I forced the share through the earth by my unaided efforts. At least, I could not see that the horses did anything particular except to keep ahead, although sometimes the machine took long bounds over the surface so that when my row was finished it looked like a succession of dots and dashes.
The farmer and his son were dying of laughter at my red face, strained back, blistered hands, and panting breast, so I felt my religious influence over them would be gone until I learned how to do it, which I presently did. Hic labor, hic opus est. To return to my story, this young man was utterly impractical. He knew nothing about farming, and did not have the particular bent of mind by which he could learn. A succession of bad years and partial crop failures, and recurring children—they are the only crops which never fail on a frontier farm—reduced the family to the direst depths. The woman had a pretty taste with her pen and pencil, and she actually supported them, Proudly rejecting any offers of charity during one hard long winter by painting and embroidering dainty trifles which her friends carried about throughout the state and disposed of for her, and she did all the other work that devolved upon her besides.
The life of a frontier farmer's wife is about the hardest which can fall to the lot of woman. She has duties about which her more favored sisters know nothing. All the cares of a large and ever-increasing family, with several hired hands to cook and wash for, usually a calf or two to bring up by hand, a brood of motherless chicks needing attention, a kitchen-garden, cows to milk, and heaven only knows what else. She has no society and no amusements, very infrequent church services, with no time to read and no place to go. She even finds no interest in the changing fashions, for the fashion of her narrow world never changes. Her life is a tragedy, the saddest of all, of the commonplace. She often dies old in middle age, or goes mad.
The largest group in the state lunatic asylum is made up of farmers' wives. When, by chance, she does survive all the troubles and labors of youth and middle life, she becomes one of the finest, sturdiest, strongest, most independent and self-respecting of women. She has suffered, struggled, and not been broken. The men live other and larger lives. They are in the open air, mainly. They go to town frequently, trade, discuss, vote. It is a different story. Wherever I went, I never got away from culture and refinement. I stopped for a glass of water once at a nondescript dwelling, half dugout, half sod house, alone on the prairie. As I dismounted from my horse, a woman came out to greet me. She had been graceful and pretty.
I could see it in spite of her worn, haggard, and overworked look. I remarked, as I took the proffered tin dipper of water, that I had never seen a house quite like that before. She answered that neither had she, but that she was even glad for that poor shelter for herself and children. She, too, was a graduate of an Eastern College, and I baptized her two little children before I rode away. Her husband was away after cattle, and she was alone. There was not another house, four miles, in any direction. Oh, the hardships the people endured in bad years! I will not slander the western country. When it gets water, it blossoms like the rose, and crops are simply enormous. People who live in the East have no idea of the fertility of the soil and the luxuriance of the vegetation when there is rain.
But they are equally unable to realize the aridity and desolation of the land when there is no water. I have seen it when the hot winds came up from the south and fairly withered the grain. I have ridden for two days through walls of corn that towered above my head as I sat my horse, and two days after I have seen that same corn wilted and ruined, as if a gigantic flatiron had been pressed upon it, When two or three years of drought would follow in succession, the misery of the people would become almost unendurable. I remember, after burying the daughter of the king I told you of, I hitched up a pair of bronchos and drove off to a town twenty-seven miles away. There had been no rain for months.
The winter wheat was all killed, and corn had not yet been planted. The fields were bare and desolate beyond description. The dust from the roads, where it had not been blown away by the fierce winds, was over the fetlocks of the horses. Everything was dry and burned up to the last degree. It was a cold, bleak day in March. Driving rapidly along, at a turn in the road, I came across a curious picture. There was a dilapidated prairie schooner, which was in this instance a common farm wagon with a tattered canvas top on circular hoops. A shabby, faded, dejected woman sat on the high seat, holding a nursing baby in her arms. Two little children stood or sat beside her, and the father of the family had dismounted and was standing in the road by his team.
One of his horses, wretched creatures they were, had fallen in the traces, and was dying. The other stood quietly, with drooping head, contemplating his companion. Half a dozen gaunt, starved horses were looking at the group from over a fence nearby, in a manner which strongly suggested compassion and sympathy. On the other side of the road, in a cornfield, from which every stalk of corn had been stripped, by hungry cattle, lay a dead cow and two dead horses, which had probably starved or died of thirst. There were black crow circling around, and over everything the dust, blinding, choking, throttling dust. As I reined in my horses, the man sat down in the wayside ditch, buried his head in his hands, looked at the dead horse, and cried.
I heard the woman say, "'Don't, Papa, don't!' as I stopped. You seem to be in trouble, stranger, I said. Can I help you? Can I do anything for you? No, said he, looking up defiantly. God's forgot us. Drive on. The next year was a bountiful one. Such crops I never saw, and to anticipate, for several years after they continued the same. Just for curiosity, I once tried to force my horse through a field of saugrum, used for fodder, and found the greatest difficulty in making any progress at all, so thick and dense was the growth of the cane. In the fall of that year, while driving along the country road, I came across another prairie schooner with a happier family of occupants. I asked the man where he was going.
"'Going back east,' he said blithely. "'Back to old Illinois.'" Didn't you have a good crop this year? I queried. Splendid! Glorious! Never saw such crops! Such a yield! he cried. Well, why are you leaving, then? I asked. Stranger, he said impressively, this is the first time in five years that I have had any crop at all, and it's the first chance in five years for me to scrape up enough money to get away. I swore if I got the chance, I would take it, and that's why I'm going back. Again. Some of the farmers, the better ones, pluckily stuck it out, and in many good years they reaped their reward. General Sheridan said that all the netherworld needed to make it habitable was water and good society.
That country had plenty of society. It only wanted water. Horses were cheap there. In fact, you could hardly give them away. I remember a stockman came to a friend of mine, speaking on this wise. I've got six young and middling horses, well broke, and, considering the hard times, in pretty fair condition. What'll you give me for them? I'll give you ten just like em, said my friend, and think myself lucky to save the feed and care of four of em.
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5 04 - Chapter 4 22:38
In one of the border towns, we had services in an abandoned saloon. The building was not in a very good location for a saloon. That's why it was abandoned. But it would do very well for a church. Any old place would do for that, you know. So we cleaned it out and fixed it up nicely. The town had been a very wild one, and the saloon had been one of the worst there, which is saying a good deal. Men had been killed within its walls, and some grim, ominous stains under the chancel carpet Which, like Rizzio's blood, could not be washed out, told the story, but one of the best missions I ever served was located just there. Services were held on one weekday, afternoon, and night, every six weeks or so, as I could get to them, and were so popular that nearly the whole town attended them.
A wandering and somewhat dilapidated amusement company, a concert troupe, I think it was, once drifted into the town and made arrangements to give a performance on the night appointed for the services. Very few tickets were sold, and when they inquired the reason, they found out that almost everybody was going to church. They came to us then with a pitiful tale, which their appearance bore out, of hard times, bad luck, and small houses, and wanted to know if we could not help them in some way. They said that if I would appoint the hour of service for seven o'clock, they would postpone their performance until half-past eight. Besides, they would give me a free ticket, and all hands come to my show, if I would go to theirs.
I accepted their offer, of course. They were all interested attendants at the service, and I believe they reaped a fair reward by their compromise with their own performance afterwards. That is the only instance on record, so far as my knowledge goes, where a theatrical company postponed its performance for church services. One summer afternoon, I found myself twenty-seven miles away from a town down in the Indian Territory. I was due there in the evening for services and a wedding. When I went down to the station in the afternoon to take the train, I found that heavy rains and a cloudburst had washed out the bridges, and that no train would be sent through until the next day. For the same reason, it would be impossible to drive.
So I determined to ride. A friend of mine, who, because he was the agent of the Standard Oil Company in that country, rejoiced under the name of Coal-Oil Johnny, offered to get a couple of horses and show me the way. So I telegraphed ahead to the anxious bride that I would be there that night, a little late, perhaps, but that I would surely come. I strapped up some vestments in a little roll, and put it on my shoulders, as I had an idea of what we might expect, mounted the Broncos, and away we started. I have ridden many Broncos, but this was the worst I ever rode. To be strictly accurate, I would hardly say that I rode him at all. I managed to stick on, and that was all. He bucked, and kicked, and bit, and shied, and stopped, and balked, and did everything for which his breed is famous.
It sometimes seemed to me that he was doing all these things at the same time. When he made up his mind to go, however, he went like the wind. On the old principle of being in Rome and doing as the Romans, I soon learned that the cowboy method of letting the reins hang loosely, lifting them high in the air, digging in the spurs, and yelling frantically in his ear, was the best way to accelerate his pace. He would run, and continue to run like a frightened deer, as long as the notion seized him, and a nice, dignified spectacle we must have presented at such times. It was exhilarating, but dangerous, for the ground was full of prairie-dog holes, hidden in the buffalo grass, and we never knew when the Bronco might put his foot in one, break his leg, and perhaps kill his rider, to say nothing of the dog.
Cole Oil Johnny's horse was quite as bad as mine. He said he had meant to give me the better of the two, but mine seemed the worst, perhaps because I rode him. They had strapped on my boots a pair of Mexican spurs with rowels like shark's teeth, which annoyed me very much more than they did my Bronco. Every time I inadvertently touched him, he had a fit. However, they were the only things by which he could be coerced in any degree. We had to swim two rivers and one creek. I had crossed them a few days before on the train. They were almost dry in their beds. Now they were roaring torrents. This is a common occurrence with those streams. We forced the horses in the swirling, muddy water of the river, and when we got into the deep water, slipped out of the saddle, and, retaining tight hold of the high horn, swam alongside to relieve them of our weight.
The current swept us down the stream with fearful velocity, and it was only after a long hard struggle that we reached the other bank, a long distance below our starting point. We were forced to mount while the horses were scrambling out of the water, or we would have had great difficulty in getting into the saddle again. The other streams, not being so deep nor so swift, we remained in the saddle. When I was in the deep water and touched him with the spur, I found that I finally had the advantage. He couldn't buck or do anything but hump himself and snort, both of which he did with great vehemence. Late in the evening we reached the town. Pretty much the whole population were out on the sidewalks, including the groom and friends of the bride, and amid wild cheering and laughter, the two wet bedraggled figures rode down the main street.
Both horses reserving this particular moment for the final exhibition of their general and entire wickedness. I could just manage to walk to the church that evening, for I never was so sore and stiff in my life. We had a pretty wedding. Though the converted saloon was only decorated with tumbleweed, and the carpet upon which the bride walked to the groom's spring wagon was of the kind popularly known as rag, for the bride was pretty and the groom was manly, and after all those are the things which count. I said that the Bronco was the best possible horse for missionary journeyings, and so he is. He is an ugly, ill-tempered, vicious, cross-grained, undersized, half-starved, flea-bitten, abandoned little beast, and he gives the missionary abundant opportunity to practice the sublime virtue of self-restraint.
As a horrible example of total depravity, he beats anything that I know of. He is apt to do anything. Except a good thing, at any moment. When he appears most serenely unconscious, look out for him, for that is the hour in which he meditates some diabolical action. He bucks when he is ridden, and balks when he is driven, but once get him going, and he shows his mettle. He can go, and go like the wind, and go all day, and live on one blade of grass and one drop of dew, and keep awake all night. and keep you awake, too, and go again all next day, and keep it up until he tires out everything and everybody in competition with him. For when you get him started, you can absolutely depend upon him. He never gets sick, nor breaks down, and I do not believe he ever dies.
But it is awfully hard getting him started sometimes. I knew a missionary party that had a pair of bronchos, one of which could be started only in one way. The other, of course, was in sympathy with and regulated his movements by his companion. Two disinterested people who were not going with the party would pass the bite of a stout rope around the hind fetlocks of the recalcitrant animal, and each take one end and saw away until you could almost smell the burning hair. When, without one word of warning, the beast would bolt, and from that time would go all day, cheerfully, at the liveliest kind of a trot, provided they were not halted for anything. If they were stopped, the same process would have to be gone over with again.
Moral suasion was entirely lost on these horses, yet you could not help liking them. They were so mean, they were actually charming. I never shall forget the first time that I ever threw my leg across the back of one of these animals. He bucked just one buck. I did not stay with him more than a second, but the impression he made in that second was a lasting one. I can feel it yet. Coal-oil Johnny and his Bronco reminded me of my first service in the territory. All that I asked of the people who came to the services, including a large number of cowboys, was that they should pay my traveling expenses, my support being provided elsewhere. After the services, I noted that the offering amounted to less than one dollar, which was not nearly enough.
I stepped out among the congregation and told them the facts, and stated that I had heard of the proverbial generosity of the cowboys, and in other places experienced it, but that it did not seem to be a quality of the men before me. There was a pause for a moment, and the nearest man walked up and put a dollar in the collection basket. His example was followed by others, until there were a number of silver dollars there, and I never had occasion to speak on the subject in that town again. I am very fond of the genuine cowboy, now fast disappearing. I've ridden and hunted with him. Eaten and laughed with him, camped and slept with him, wrestled and prayed with him, and I always found him a rather good sort, fair, honorable, generous, kindly, loyal to his friends, his own worst enemy.
The impression he makes on civilization when he rides through a town in a drunken revel, shooting miscellaneously at everything, is a deservedly bad one, I grant you. But you should see him on the prairie, in a round-up, or before a stampede. There is a man, and a hero. Speaking of collections, a man came up to me one day after service, and was pleased to address me in this manner. Say, parson, that there service and sermon was brand. I wouldn't have missed him for five dollars. When I suggested that he hand me the difference between the amount he had put in the collection and the figure he mentioned for my missionary work, he stopped suddenly, looked at me with his mouth wide open, and then slowly pulled from his pocket four dollars and ninety cents, which he handed to me without a word.
He, like many others, resembled that old woman who said she had been a Christian for fifty years, and she thanked God it had never cost her a cent. I used to have other weddings from time to time, and on one occasion I had two in the same town on the same day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The first wedding fee I received was $10, a very large remuneration for the place and people. After the second wedding, the best man called me into a private room, and thus addressed me. "'What's the tax, parson?' "'Anything you like, or nothing at all,' I answered. I have frequently received nothing. "'Now,' said he, "'we want to do this thing up in style, but I have had no experience in this business, and do not know what is proper.
You name your figure.' I suggested that the legal charge was two dollars. "'Pshaw!' he said. "'This ain't legal. We want to do something handsome.' "'Go ahead and do it,' I said, whereupon he reflected a moment, and then asked me how much I had received for the wedding of the morning. "'Ten dollars,' I replied. His face brightened at once. Here was a solution to the difficulty. "'I'll see his ante,' he remarked. "'Raise him five dollars and call.' Whereupon he handed me fifteen dollars. The first wedding I ever had was the marriage of a cable-car gripman and a little dressmaker. The man disconcerted me greatly by repeatedly urging me before and during the ceremony to hurry up, as he only had a lay-off for one trip.
When I finished, he said he would see me next week, but that next week has never come around. The churches in the West suffer greatly from cyclones, properly called tornadoes, though I shall use the popular name. During the four years in which I was connected with one diocese as its archdeacon, we lost one church every year from that cause. The dwelling houses and other buildings of a great many of our adherents were wrecked, and in several instances some of them lost their lives. One Sunday I was called upon to preach a memorial sermon for a young woman who had been killed in one of these cyclones. She was a schoolmistress, and was boarding around. With something like a dozen people—I forget the exact number—she was caught in a large house, which stood on the edge of a high bluff by a tremendous cyclone.
The house was completely wrecked, and every inmate of it, except one, was killed immediately, or died within an hour or so. The one who survived, though badly injured, said that the family were at supper when the storm struck the house, that the little schoolmistress happened to sit next the omnipresent baby at the table in its high chair. When they found the poor girl that night, she was still alive, though unconscious, and she died almost instantly. The awful force of the wind had torn from her person everything she had on, including two rings, except one shoe. Her hair was actually whipped to rags. She had been driven through several barbed-wire fences, and every bone in her body was broken.
In her arms, however, and clasped tightly to her breast, was the dead body of that little infant. Womanlike, she had seized the child when she felt the shock of the storm, and not even the tornado itself had been strong enough to tear the baby from her arms. It was a splendid example of that altruistic instinct of womanhood upon which religion and society depend. Dead on the field of honor, little mistress of a larger school. Blessed is her name among those who knew her, and this will give a wider circulation to this story of every-day heroism. All the other churches closed their doors on this occasion, and united with us in doing honor to this heroic girl. The first visit the bishop of that missionary jurisdiction made in that town, he had to bury, I think, nineteen victims of that cyclone.
One of the churches we lost had just been completed a second time after having been partially destroyed previously by fire. About fifteen feet away from the church was a little ramshackle three-roomed house of the flimsiest construction which was used for the rectory. Save the mark. Between the two stood a large maple tree, certainly a foot in diameter. That cyclone tore the church building to pieces. There was not a single piece of timber left standing, and even the stones of the foundation wall were scattered all over the adjoining country. That tree next to the church was twisted off about six feet from the ground, and the whole top disappeared we knew not where. The end that stood in the air was shivered like a paint-brush, and the little rickety house, not ten feet from the tree, and which a strong man might almost have toppled over, was not injured in the slightest degree.
Oh, but the people of that mission were plucky. They had lost the first church by fire, the second by cyclone, and the wind had hardly died down before they commenced to lay plans and raise money. That was the first thing, of course, to build again. All the communicants were women. There were one or two men who helped a little, but the bulk of the work was done by the women. Their religious services had been carried on by a lay-reader, quite the most inefficient one I ever saw, who was a candidate for orders. He had been transferred to us from another diocese farther east, and we had but little opportunity to try his medal. We got all sorts of queer things unloaded upon us from the East, including clergymen.
Bishop Williams is reported as having looked back with great satisfaction on the number of men he kept out of the ministry, on account of their manifest unfitness, of course. We used to think that many of those he did not keep out came out West. The regular clergy and missionaries were as noble and able and devoted a body of men as any with whom I ever came in contact, but deliver me from those who came west because they failed east. That kindly bishops sometimes palmed them off on their poorer western brethren did not help matters at all. This particular lay reader came up for examination shortly after the cyclone, and his ignorance was painful and pitiable. The chief examiner of that diocese, a venerable and learned old priest, asked him as the first question, Where was our Saviour born?
A look of deep anxiety spread over the face of the young man, who groped around in his mind in painful silence, and finally said hesitatingly, Well, I do not believe I know where he was born. I think it maybe was in Jerusalem. That will do, sir," said the chief examiner, sadly, but firmly. I will not continue the examination any further. The entire unfitness of the young man was made manifest by other circumstances as well. Their experience with him, the people said, had been worse than with the cyclone. When he was dropped, they were put on my list by the bishop for occasional services until I could get them a clergyman. They fitted up the little rectory as a chapel, and began to raise funds for a new church building.
When they were in a fair way of completing the desired sum, the city chose to pave the streets around the church, which took all they had in the bank. Nothing daunted, however, they still persisted, and now they have a very pretty little church, a resident clergyman, regular services, and as many men communicants as women. I do not know of anything pluckier than their long fight. They have learned something, too, and in addition to a fire, they carry cyclone insurance. I have known cyclones to play some strange pranks. On one occasion, two horses were lifted up in the air, and carefully deposited, unharmed, in a walled field about an eighth of a mile away. I saw them there. I have seen chickens and geese with every feather torn off of them, picked clean, and still feebly alive.
One house, I remember, had a hole about ten feet in diameter cut out of its roof as if by a circular saw, evidently by the very tip end of the funnel. It was otherwise untouched. I have seen the black whirling cloud sweeping through a valley at a terrific rate, its fell progress marked by the destruction it caused as it actually leaped and bounded through the air. I saw that one pick up an outbuilding, and apparently lift it up and shake it to pieces as one shakes a pepper-box. One of the worst ones I ever knew tossed a heavy iron safe about as a child might a wooden alphabet block in play. I have known of a house wrecked and all of its inmates killed, and other instances where no one was hurt, although the building was literally blown away from them.
When buildings were completely torn to pieces, they frequently presented the appearance of having been wrecked by some inside explosion, especially if they had been shut up when the storm broke. Of all the manifestations of power that I ever witnessed, and I happen to have seen almost everything, from an earthquake down except a volcano in eruption, a cyclone or tornado is the most appalling. The midnight blackness of the funnel, the lightning darting from it in inconceivable fierceness, the strange crackling sound which permeates it, the suddenness of the irresistible attack, its incredibly swift motion, its wild leaping and bounding like a gigantic, ravening beast of prey, The destruction of its progress, the awful roar which follows it, the human lives taken in the twinkling of an eye, the wreck of property and fortune in its trail.
May God deliver us from that mighty besom of wrath and destruction.
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6 05 - Chapter 5 19:16
The physical weakling has no place in the missionary work in the west. The distances to be covered are so great The number of places necessary allotted to one man so many, the means of transportation so varied and unpleasant, the demands upon strength and bodily vigor so overwhelming, that it is no easy matter for the strongest to live up to the requirements. I had just been holding a parochial mission, what most people would call a revival, though with many of the distinguishing features of a revival omitted, in a certain little town. There had been three or four services a day for a week, with a crowded church every night. Naturally, the work was exhausting. At the end of the week I was tired, but imperious necessity compelled me to undertake the following journey.
At the close of the mission, at half after nine o'clock on Sunday night, on the first of January, the weather being clear and intensely cold, I drove, in company with another man, Twenty-two miles to catch a train on the Memphis road. We arrived at the little way station at half-past one in the morning. It was shut up and deserted, and the town was a mile away. We first blanketed our shivering horses, and then set about making ourselves comfortable. We broke into the station through the window, smashed up a packing box, carried lumps of coal with our hands from a coal car outside, drenched the hole with oil from the lamp, and with great difficulty made a fire in the stove. After partaking of our frugal lunch, my companion started on his return trip, leaving me alone in the station for a long time.
When the train, which was two hours late, came along, I hunted up a lantern and flagged it. When I entered the coach, I saw that the baker heater was in the wrong end of it, and the car was like an ice-house. There were several women and children whom the male passengers had made comfortable with their overcoats, who were crowded up close to the heater in the rear end. The men kept themselves alive by walking up and down the aisle in a long line. I joined the procession. We reached Kansas City very late. I had only time to connect with another train, had no breakfast except peanuts. I have made a meal of peanuts bought from the train-boy many and many a time in my experiences, and have been thankful to get them.
I reached my destination about one o'clock, had services, with sermon and a meeting of the Women's Guild in the afternoon, services and sermon again, with baptism and a public reception at night. I retired at 1130 p.m. and rose at 230 in the morning to take another train, Which I never left until six o'clock the next evening. After services, a sermon, and a baptism that night, I was thoroughly done up. Here is the record of two weeks, by no means unique, taken from my journal, and be it noted that at every place where we had services there was, of course, a sermon and an address. Friday, service at M in evening. Saturday, left M at 3.30 a.m. Reached P at 6 p.m. Service. Sunday. Left P at 1 a.m.
Reached C at 2.30 a.m. Services at 7, 9, and 10 a.m. Left C at 11.50 a.m. Reached A at 6 p.m. Services at night and next morning. Monday. Reached C at 3 p.m. Services afternoon and evening. Tuesday. Drove to M. Services at night. Wednesday, left for L at 6 a.m., services at 10.30 a.m., 3.30 and 7.30 p.m., left L at 11 p.m. Thursday, reached the station at 4 a.m. after driving 32 miles, lay down on the platform and went to sleep until the arrival of the way freight, 5.30 a.m., N.B. This was a common practice in summer. I have had many sound sleeps on station platforms, with a valise for a pillow and the open sky for a cover. On freight all day. Reached W. At 730 p.m. Services in the evening and next morning.
Friday. Road 10 miles to catch express. Arrived at C. At 6 p.m. Services and wedding rehearsal that night. Saturday, services at 7 a.m. Baptismal service at 845, services at 9 a.m. Rode five miles into Indian territory to baptize and admit to the communion a dying man. Baptized his wife and children. Rode back to church. Solemnized a marriage. Took train for S at 2 p.m. Services at 8 p.m. Sunday, services at 7, 9, 10, and 11 a.m., Left at 1 p.m. for W. Services at night. Monday, drove 12 miles for country service, all-night ride to L. Tuesday, convocation at L. Wednesday, reached H. Two weddings in afternoon, services at night. Thursday, met the bishop in the afternoon, drove 15 miles to R. Services.
Friday, services at M. Saturday, services afternoon and evening at W. Sunday, services at 8, 10, and 11 a.m. at M. again, drove 12 miles for afternoon service at W. Returned in time for services at M. at 7.30 p.m. Monday. I rested. There are dozens of missionaries and clergymen out west who would regard a trip like that as nothing at all. I did not mind it much myself. In three years, by actual count, I traveled over ninety-one thousand miles by railroad, wagon, and on horseback, preaching or delivering addresses upward of eleven hundred times, besides writing letters, papers, making calls, marrying, baptizing, and doing all the other endless work of an itinerant missionary. And that reminds me of the question so often asked, What is an archdeacon?
He is a man who helps the bishop do just the sort of things I have described. Most people are familiar with the answer of the English bishop, who was requested by Parliament to define the duties and work of an archdeacon, whereupon he sapiently replied that the principal work of an archdeacon was to perform archdiaconal functions. A friend of mine put it rather cleverly this way. Considering a deacon as a minister or server, an archdeacon bears the same relation to a deacon as an archfiend does to a fiend. He is the same thing, only more so. It was difficult for the people in the little towns to get the title straight, and I was usually advertised as the archbishop. On one occasion, when inquiry was made by someone as to what an archbishop was, this reply was given.
Why, an archbishop is a kind of a boss of the bishop. The bishop and the clergy got hold of this story, and they called me the boss until I felt like a politician. The official title of an archdeacon is the Venerable. People who did not know me would learn that much and make careful preparation for the reception of an old decrepit man—warm beds, bright fires, easy-chairs, etc., When I appeared, they would look upon me as a fraud, because I was only venerable officially. I enjoyed the comforts just the same. Such a reception was better than being ushered into a stone-cold best room, and left with the cheerful remark that no one had slept in the room since grandmother died. As I crept into bed, I did not wonder the poor old lady had expired.
I felt like it myself. Speaking of missions a moment since reminds me of an appreciative remark with which I was greeted by a nice old colored sister at the close of one of my missions, which had been held in this instance in a colored church. This turbaned aged lady at the close of the service grasped me by the hand and said, "'Gord bless yer for yer love, brudder, and o God bless yer for yer brains!' I always value that saying very highly, and that reminds me of another old-coloured woman of my acquaintance, who belonged to the Methodist church, though she was the sexton of our church. The Methodists were having a revival, during which this old woman felt called upon to make a prayer. She commenced with the stern spirit of an ancient Puritan, and closed with the tenderness of an old southern mammy.
Oh, Lord, take de sinners! Up sea, and shake em, and over de fears of hell, but please, lord, don't drop em. I used to meet many interesting characters upon the trains. Once, when I was taking a little relation to visit its grandmother, we came back from the dining-car to our seats in the coach, on the B. M. Road, late in the evening, and found the brakeman sitting in one of them, with a little story I had been reading, Sunset Pass, by Captain King, in his hand. He immediately arose and handed me the book. "'No,' I said. Sit still and read a little, if you wish to. "'No, sir,' he replied, resuming his seat. "'I never read any more—novels—while I am on duty, because of something that happened to me once.' Oh, said I, scenting a story.
How was that? Well, sir, I was reading a story one day. Twas a blamed good story, too. Name of it was White Cloud, or Red Cloud. This next station always reminds me of the name. We were nearing White Cloud Station. Seems to me that Captain Main-Reed wrote it. Anyhow, I was breaking on a freight on the Wabash, Rear End Brakeman. We ran off the main line onto a sidon to wait for the Fast Express to pass us by. It was a lonesome little place, and I was sent back to throw the switch for the express train. She was late, and I walked along to the switch, reading as I went. And would you believe it, Parson? I never throwed that doggone switch at all. Just sat down on the bank under a tree and read away.
All of a sudden, I heard the whistle of the... Express, and here she was a-coming round the bend like. Like, well, she was making forty miles an hour, maybe, and at that minute I seen the target of the switch was pointing straight at me, and I knew that switch wasn't throwed, and in a minute she'd be crashing into that freight, and there be trouble. Gosh, parson, I tell you, I dropped that fool novel, and put for that switch, and I got it too, but I hadn't no more than throwed it over than the front wheels of that there engine passed over it. Twas a mighty close call. Well, what did you do with the book? Did you ever finish the story? I asked. No, I just sat there on the bank trembling till the conductor called me into the caboose, and I never picked up the book again, just left it there by the road.
Never finished the story either. Just then the train rushed around a bend in the track, and we came in sight of the Missouri River, looking stealthy and treacherous enough, with its white sandbars showing grim and ghastly under the night mist, which a faint moonlight seemed to render more eerie than ever. The boy clapped his little hands together and exclaimed, "'Oh, Uncle! The river! See the moon shining on those things in the water! What are they?' Those are sandbars, I replied, and that is a very miserable sort of a river anyway, my boy. Yeah, said the brakeman. I heard a man say t'other day that there was just two things God Almighty didn't take no notice of. There were two wicked for him.
One was Blank City, and the other the Missouri River. Say, little fellow, taking the little lad in his arms and lifting him on his lap, come here to me and let me look at you. "'D'you know I had a little girl like you once, same kind of eyes and yellow hair, only it twas curly and fair complexion, too, just like him, preacher.' "'Where is she now?' asked the boy, looking interestedly at his new friend. "'She's dead, my boy. Gosh, it most killed me, stranger. She took sick of it Tuesday and died a Wednesday.' "'I know somebody that's dead,' remarked the boy gravely. "'Do you, little feller? Who may that be?' "'My mama.' He replied, and we all looked at each other in silence while the train sped on swiftly through the moonlit night.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. Is that touch a community of sorrow, I wonder? Speaking of little boys reminds me of another lad about whom a friend of mine told me. He belonged to a family who had trained him to believe in the deep-water form of baptism. Like the boy who tried it on the dog, he was experimenting with the household cat and a bucket of water. The animal evidently did not believe in immersion, for she resisted, bit, scratched and clawed, and used bad language in the cat-tongue, of course. Finally, the little boy, with his hands covered with scratches and with tears in his eyes, gave up the effort to effect the regeneration of the cat. "'Doggone you!' he cried. Notice the nice choice of epithets in the use of the word dog.
Go and be an episcopal cat if you want to. The way the women worked for the church out west was a marvel. One old lady, who supported herself meagerly by the hardest kind of daily labor, decided to raise the money for the west window of a little chapel we were building, and also to purchase an organ herself. She was nearly threescore years old, yet with indomitable spirit she went from house to house and from farm to farm, walking five miles sometimes into the country, and being thankful to get ten cents for the purpose—ten cents which often represented a large sum of money to the poor farmer. The sturdy, fearless old woman asked everybody. She caught one wayfarer, who stepped off the train to get a breath of air at the station, and said she would hold him by the lapel of his coat until he gave her a dime, which he promptly did.
One man offered her a nickel in response to her appeal, but she said it was against her principles to put down less than a dime upon her book, and if he could only afford to give her a nickel, she would add five cents from her own funds and put it down as a dime from him. Whereupon he immediately gave her a dollar. She succeeded in completing both her undertakings in the end, and her chief happiness thereafter was to sit under the window and listen to the music of the organ. I was sitting on the steps of the church, feeling rather melancholy about our slow progress one day, when I noticed the old woman coming around the corner with a large sack upon her shoulders. She was busily engaged in picking up bits of wood and chips from the wayside, staggering along under her burden.
Good gracious, said I. What on earth are you doing? Oh, she said, it is you, Mr. Brady. Well, sir, I needed some kindling, and it just occurred to me, if I could take my sack and go around these new buildings and gather up enough chips to equal a load of cobs, why, I could take the dollar and fifty cents, the cost of the cobs, and put it into the window fund. Don't you think that's fair?" I thought it was very fair. Speaking of music reminds me of the difficulty we often had in getting people to sing in the services. I have sung duets myself with the organist until the organist got tired and quit, for which I could hardly blame her under the circumstances. And that reminds me of a man who was the possessor of the most versatile voice I ever had the pleasure of listening to, and his courage was as high as his voice was various.
We were supposed to have a quartet choir in that mission, but if any of the singers happened to be absent, it made no difference in the music, for the man with a comprehensive voice could and would sing any part. I have actually known him to sing the soprano solo of the anthem. and then immediately after sing the bass solo, carrying a few bars of the alto part, and wind up with the chorus, all by himself. Twas nobly done, though the effect was startling, and the music never failed when he was there. I spoke of the faithful work of the women. Once in a while we got hold of laymen who did equally good services. In fact, I know one church in which everything was done by the men, even to the cutting out of the red hangings of the chancel, which they decorated with crosses cut out from yellow cloth, which they pasted or fastened with tacks to the other.
The effect was good enough, though it was not embroidery. The men were the dominant factors in that mission, and it was one of the best in the diocese, never having a bit of trouble within its borders until the women took hold. There was a lay-reader who conducted services in another mission. He had been a stout old soldier in his day, and was a first-class man, but his knowledge of Hebrew was limited, and his pronunciation of unfamiliar Bible names was a thing at which to marvel. When he opened the Bible on one occasion to read the lesson, he could not find the place, which was in one of the minor prophets, great stumbling-blocks to more experienced men, by the way, and after turning the pages nervously for some minutes, in the face of a tittering congregation, he finally opened the book at random and began to read.
As ill-luck would have it, he lighted upon one of the genealogical chapters in Ezra, the second. He struggled along through half a column of Hebrew names, and finally turned the last leaf in the hope that there would be a change in the substance of the chapter on the other side. What he saw proved too much for him, for after one frightened glance he closed the reading in this way, and a page and a half more of the same kind, brethren. Here endeth the first lesson.
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7 06 - Chapter 6 20:58
One day I was seated in the station at Medicine Lodge, awaiting the train. I was reading intently and was absorbed in my book, but I noticed a cowboy walking about the room, eyeing me, evidently desiring to be sociable. He finally stopped before me, saying, "'Good morning, stranger. What might you be a-doin?' "'I am reading,' I answered. "'What are you reading?' "'A book on evolution.' "'What's evolution?' he asked curiously. Herbert Spencer's famous definition was on the page before my eyes, and without a second's hesitation I read it off in the most rapid manner. Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
The effect was startling. My God! he cried, and then he stepped backward in his tracks, threw up his hands, gazed at me with astonished eyes, and with jaws dropping in amazement, absolutely backed out of the room. I think this is the only instance on record of a cowboy being held up by Herbert Spencer. I left that town on the little rickety railroad, which was the tenuous link connecting it with civilization, just as a violent storm was arising. Before the train reached the junction point on the main line, a way-station which rejoiced in the utterly incongruous name of Attica, a fully developed sandstorm was raging through the country. It was mid-winter, and the thermometer dropped suddenly as the whirling masses of dust and sand came sweeping down from the north over the bare prairie.
It is impossible to describe adequately the thickness of the atmosphere. No object could have been discerned at a distance exceeding the width of an ordinary street, on account of the sand. The train was stalled in a cut near the station by the mass of sand, which filled the excavation almost up to the platforms of the cars, and the engine died. To face the swirling mass for any length of time was to have one's face cut to pieces. It was impossible to force an engine through the sand, and even a rotary snowplow would have made no impression upon it whatever. There was nothing to be done but to abandon the train, and wait for the abatement of the storm, and then dig it out with shovels. The train-hands and the few passengers made their way to a building, called by courtesy a hotel, which stood near the station.
The sandstorm died away in the course of the afternoon, and was succeeded by a blizzard, so that the sand-heaps were covered by deep snow. Wires were down in every direction, and trains blockaded all over the state. The winter wheat had actually been blown out of the ground in many places. It was deathly cold. The landlord of the hotel, with his wife and children, occupied one room with a fire in it. Another was given to the women passengers of the train, and that exhausted the tail of the rooms, which were heated. The house was so old that I could push aside the mop-board and thrust my foot out into the air through the rotten weather-boarding in the room which was allotted to me for sleeping.
There were no blankets on the bed, which was of the variety known as shuck. I lay down on the comfortable, singular misnomer, with all my clothes on, including my shoes. It was the first time I ever went to bed with my boots on, and rolled myself up within its compass. But it was absolutely impossible to sleep. The cold was so intense. So a little after midnight I arose, went down to the office, and kindled a fire. I was joined presently by the rest of the men who had been similarly accommodated. By the next morning, the storm had died away, leaving the ground covered with snow, though the intense cold still continued. There was illness in my family, and, as I was unable to communicate with them by telegraph, I felt my presence at home was imperative.
By dint of much persuasion, and the expenditure of almost all the money I had, I succeeded in getting two horses and a sleigh with which to drive to the town, whence I hoped the railroad might be open. I was to leave the horses until called for. I reached the town all right, with one hand and part of my face frost-bitten, took the train, made another railroad connection, ran into a drift, tried it again, and after two other similar experiences reached my destination, five days late. The family were all right when I got there. Snow-blockades were frequent. I was on a freight train one winter morning, which pulled into a little siding to allow the Overland Limited to pass and proceed on its way.
There was a bit of woodland down the road, out of which the track sprang in a rather sharp curve. I stepped out of the caboose and stood on the little station platform to watch the express train go by. I always do that. I like to see it. We could hear the roar of it a long distance over the prairie, coming nearer and nearer. Suddenly, like the thunderbolt itself, it darted out of the screen of woodland, whirled around the curve, and rocking like a storm, made for the station. It passed by, at a speed of more than fifty miles an hour, a great train of Pullman cars drawn by a splendid engine. It split the air like a flash of lightning. The ground fairly quivered under the weight of it. The roar in our ears was appalling.
The dust swept by us as if from a cyclone. The eye had scarcely time to realize its approach before the concussion of its passage stopped the breath. Almost before the roar had died away, it was gone. Such a splendid exhibition of applied power and science I have not often seen. As I stood there recovering my composure, a little drop of snow drifted softly down and rested gently upon my cheek. Ah, said I, as I felt the cold touch, looking after the train in vanishing perspective already far away, this is that which masters you, and before the night fell, that avalanche of steel, that modern embodiment of force and power, was lying quiet and helpless, its fires burnt out, its life gone, in the grasp of millions of tiny little crystals like that which had just caressed my cheek.
It was quite a diversion, when blockaded by snow, to get on the rotary plough at Division Headquarters, and go out to open the road, to see the great white masses of snow in the cuts looming up before you in the moonlight, to push into it with the full strength and speed of the engine, and see it fly, to back off and continue the process until the way was clear. The roads ran through walls of corn in summer and through walls of snow in winter. I know not which were the most beautiful. Speaking of Division Headquarters reminds me that one day, while I was waiting there to make a connection, a young man came into the station looking utterly broken in body and spirit. He was white, nervous and shaking, and he was feebly pulling a bicycle after him.
I happened to know him, for he was a member of one of my mission stations up the state. It seems that he had taken his wheel to make a journey of several hundred miles to inspect some land in which he was interested. In the course of his journey, he had crossed a very large prairie field, which was broken about the middle by a high and unusual transverse ridge. When he had climbed the ridge and mounted his wheel to proceed, he noticed what the rise of ground had obscured from him, that the field was filled with Texas cattle, grazing in little bunches of from ten to fifty. Just as he started, one or two of the Longhorns caught sight of him. I presume, as it was years ago, the steers were not familiar with the machine in the country from which they came.
One bunch followed its leader over to investigate. My young friend naturally accelerated his pace, whereupon the cattle took after him. Presently other bunches caught the contagion of the pursuit, and the cattle on that field indulged in a grand man-hunt. Fortunately, the trail across it was straight and level, and led directly to an immense gait. The boy bent down over his wheel and peddled for his life. He could hear the bellowing of the cattle and the trampling of their feet behind him, but he looked neither to the right nor the left. He had no idea what he should do when he reached the gate. All his mind was fixed upon one necessity—to keep ahead. He thinks he gained a little upon them, and, as providence would have it, as he neared the gate he saw that it was open.
The road at that point took a sudden swerve, Ran along parallel to the side of the enclosing wall, and then crossed the stockade through the heavy gate at a very acute angle. He dashed through the opening like a flash of lightning, lost his pedals as soon as he got outside, darted along furiously for a short distance, struck a rut or a rock, was pitched off, and lay senseless on the ground. The man who owned the range opportunely happened to visit it at that moment. He had seen the boy on the wheel, had opened the gate to let him pass through, and, with one or two attendants, had ridden in and headed off the rushing cattle, else the lad would certainly have been killed. One of the men in one of my missions was a judge, remarkable not only for his ability, but for his upright and rigid impartiality.
A case was being tried before him, in which the community were much interested. The prisoner was very unpopular among the people, and everyone was anxious that he should be convicted, though there was a strong doubt of his guilt. At the close of the trial, the prosecuting attorney ended his address something like this. The people expect a conviction in this case, and they demand that the prisoner be found guilty and sentenced to the extreme penalty of the law. They will be satisfied with nothing else at the hands of the court and the jury. Whereupon, the judge remarked gravely, I know a case which happened long ago in an eastern land, gentlemen, where the voice of the people was practically unanimous in demanding the execution of a prisoner, and they so worked on the feelings of the judge that he sentenced an innocent man.
It was, of course, necessary that I board around on my visits to different places. The hospitality of the people was always generously and freely given—too generously sometimes, in fact, for they frequently never left me a moment alone. Sometimes, after spending the day with me, my hostess would excuse herself upon the plea of urgent household demands, and say something to this effect. But we won't allow you to get lonesome. Here's little Johnny, aged three. He will entertain you, which meant that I was to play for the rest of the day with little Johnny. I used to long for a chance to get lonesome sometime. In one other particular, the hospitality was not enjoyable, and that was when the piece de resistance of the menu was chicken.
It seems to me that I have had chicken three times a day for a week at a time. This statement is probably incorrect as to facts, but it serves to show the impression left upon me after the years that have intervened. It was frequently presented to me with the remark that preachers always liked it, especially the yellow-legged kind. Yellow-legged chickens, not preachers, be it understood. If anything could make chicken unpalatable to me beyond the mere fact that it was chicken, it would be the thought of the yellow-legged kind. It seemed to me that I had chicken, scrambled, fried, soft-boiled, and in every other possible shape. Chicken to the right of me, chicken to the left of me, chicken before me, chicken behind me, chicken, chicken everywhere, and not a drop to drink, which is a mixture of metaphors or something, but let it pass as it was in a prohibition state.
I wondered sometimes that I did not turn into a chicken myself. I think I could write a feeling essay on the prevalence of chicken in the Diocese of X. Once in a while, fortune was kind to me, and when I would make a visit to a new town, they would have meat, whereupon I never failed elaborately to express my gratitude at the absence of chicken. The news would soon be disseminated among the people of the community, and chicken would be conspicuous by its absence from every table where I was a guest in that town. But if I struck chicken on my first visit, I had it forever after. When it was not chicken, it was usually ham. I remember one little town I used to make, in which a rather curious thing happened.
I was entertained, of course, at a different house on every visit. On my first visit, I remarked that I did not drink coffee. Since coming east, I have learned to do so, with other bad habits I have acquired. On my second visit, my hostess remarked, You do not drink coffee, I believe. No, I said, I do not. On my third visit to another house, the same question and answer passed. I was more surprised, but said nothing until the conversation had been repeated five different times. Then I ventured to ask an explanation. When the remark was made, I replied, No, I do not. But may I ask, who told you? Mrs. Biggus, answered my hostess. Who is Mrs. Biggus? Well, said the lady, waiting until the maid left the room, she is the only woman whom we can secure for domestic service in the town.
Everybody who entertains you has had her at the same time to help while you were there. She knows what you like and has told everyone. Mrs. Biggis and I met frequently after that at different houses and became fast friends. She was a wise old woman, and always staved off the threatened chicken. One day I was visiting a little mission where services were carried on by a lay-reader. Just before the service, a note was brought in, asking prayers for a little Sunday-school scholar, sick with typhoid fever. After the service, the lay-reader and I went over to the home of the little lad to see him. His mother, who had been deserted by a drunken husband, lived with two little children in a two-roomed hovel.
It would be an insult to architecture to call it a house. It was winter again, and the front room was cold. There was no fire in it, and the woman with her children was in the other room, the kitchen. The little lad, about six years old, in the last and lowest stages of typhoid fever, was lying upon an old dilapidated sofa. A little baby girl, about two years old, was dying of pneumonia on a soiled pillow on a rickety Boston rocker. The broken but uncomplaining woman sat between the two, the picture of despair, Weeping the silent bitter tears of ground-down poverty and sorrow. We did what we could to comfort her, and as we walked away, I said to the lay-reader that the children would undoubtedly die, and if he would let me know, I would try to provide for their funeral expenses.
It is not necessary, he replied promptly. My people, who are all poor like these, have contributed a little fund for just such emergencies as this. That woman there has never failed to make a weekly offering to that fund, and we need no outside help. Oh, the generosity of the poor, how it counts, and what it means to God and man! I was preaching and asking for missionary money once before two different congregations on the same day. The next day brought me two contributions. One was a check for one thousand dollars. This was in the East, from a noble and generous woman who was as kind as she was wealthy. The other was an assortment of petty coins amounting to thirty cents from a blind woman, an inmate of an eleomezenary institution, who had no income of any kind, save what accrued to her from the sale of some useless articles of her own feeble handiwork, which she disposed of infrequently to the curious who chanced to visit the home.
This thirty cents was all she had made, All that she was likely to have for a long time. I valued the one gift no more than the other. That was not the point of view of a certain treasurer of a congregation I once knew. The confirmation class which was presented to the bishop was a very large one, but most of its members were young, and those who were not were poor. Yes, said the treasurer, in response to the rather enthusiastic comment of the minister. Yes, it is a nice class, but I do not think we will rent any pews in it. The same man, speaking of an unusual congregation at an evening service, said to the same minister, Yes, you are right, it is a large congregation, but there is no money in it.
I was preaching about missions another time, urging the congregation to make some sacrifice for the missionary cause, and indicating to them several methods by which they could follow my advice. Among other things, I suggested that they refrain from purchasing any book which they very much desired, and donate the money to me, instead for my missionary work. I happened to have perpetrated a book myself.
I have perpetrated several since then. You will therefore understand my feelings when a very bright woman in the congregation came up to me and handed me a dollar with this remark. I had intended to buy your book and read it, Mr. Brady, but I have concluded to follow your advice and give you the money for missions instead. I accepted the situation gracefully and the money gratefully, and told her that I would lend her my own copy of the book to read. She smiled and thanked me, and as she did so, I voiced my thought in this way. "'But, after all, Mrs. R., there does not seem to be any sacrifice on your part in this transaction, for you have the happy consciousness of having given the money for missions, and yet have the book as well.' "'No sacrifice,' she replied.
"'Why, I have to read the book.' Speaking of that book, a fine old clerical friend of mine read it, and after complimenting me upon it, concluded his remarks as follows. Well, Archdeacon, there are several dams and a hell or two in that book of yours, but after all, I thought it might well go into the parish library. Whether as a frightful example or not, he did not tell me. There is humor everywhere, even in so staid and conservative a document as the Journal of a Diocesan Convention, with its dry parochial statistics. One report, I recall, was accompanied by a note like this. The parish has added four acres to its graveyard, and hopes for a large increase in its revenue from that addition.
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8 07 - Chapter 7 21:20
One day on the Frisco Road, the engine broke down. It was a freight train, and I was the only passenger. Consequently, I went out and worked with the train crew, pulling and heaving and hauling with the rest. I knew something about the principles of mechanics, and was familiar with the machine as well, being quite capable of running the engine myself, and was therefore able to advise them to some purpose. The work was carried on under a vigorous and uninterrupted flow of profanity, profusely and picturesquely weird in the highest degree. It was not so shocking as it might be under other circumstances, for I knew the men meant nothing by it. that it was only a matter of habit with them, as it is with ninety people out of a hundred who are guilty of the same bad practice.
Finally, I suggested an interruption in the swearing, as I was a preacher. The head brakeman dropped his crowbar with a look of abject astonishment. Everybody else let go at the same time, and the engine settled down again. They looked at me in consternation, which was very amusing. Hell and blazes, said the conductor. You are a what? A preacher, I replied. Well, I'm damned, he answered, with a long whistle of astonishment. He regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, and finally said, Well, sir, you work like a man, anyway. Catch hold again. All right, I answered, smiling at his frankness, but no more swearing on this trip. Nope, was the laconic reply, and the promise was kept. At the close of our manoeuvres, when we all stood panting but successful, the engineer remarked, Well, it's the first time I ever saw a preacher that knowed a reversing lever from a box-car before.
Come up and ride with me the rest of the way. Aside from his profanity, I found him a pleasant and interesting companion, and whenever I made the town at the end of his run, he never failed to come to church. On that same train, earlier in the day, I rode, for a long distance alone, with a living interrogation point. As I am something of an interrogation point myself, as far as regards men from whom I make a practice of constantly seeking to acquire information on the subjects they know, we clashed considerably. Just before he got off, he was speaking of some friend of his, and said in a very naive way, Yes, John is a very different man from me. We ain't one bit alike, and John is one of the most honest men I ever knew.
I was glad, after that statement, that he did not try to borrow a dollar from me before he left. Speaking of a most honest man reminds me of another old friend of mine, who rejoiced under the peculiar name of Orsimus Stokham. Once, when referring to a sermon he had heard me preach, he remarked that it was a very good sermon, but pretty middlin' long, and he thought I must a got awful tired preachin' it. I had. I did not always meet with pleasant receptions at new places, and I was warned on one occasion that no services were desired and that none would be permitted, and that if I consulted my own interests and the interests of peace and harmony which I was supposed to promote, I would stay away.
Of course, after that, nothing on earth could keep a man from going to just that place. On my arrival, I was met by a large body of citizens who had no interest either in me or in religion, but who were determined to see fair play. They escorted me to a hotel, had secured a vacant store building, and were all ready for trouble if those whom they called the anti-religious faction desired to make any. In fact, I think they were thirsting for trouble. There were no women at services that night. Nothing but men, and... Guns. I did not feel particularly cheerful, but managed to get through some way, and tried somehow or other to win over the opposing faction, so that in subsequent visits, guns would be laid aside.
But we had no trouble, and I managed to get hold of them all eventually, so that my truculent escort was dispensed with in future visits, and the women came to church. When once you get the friendship of those frontiersmen, you are all right. You can say anything to them. But they are so very hasty with their weapons that frequently you do not have an opportunity to get properly introduced. Later, at this very town, I was present at a little entertainment given for the benefit of the church, and it was certainly entertaining. There were no programmes, though just before the curtain rose, an embarrassed young man came out on the stage, and stated that there was to be a queen of fame who had a laurel-wreath which she would award to the most correctly represented historical character present.
He closed with this sentence. The curtain will now raise, then the characters come in, one by one, and each particular character says what is her particular claim to this here wreath. The curtain rose, the goddess appeared, and then the characters, particular and otherwise, made their appearance before her. It was indescribably funny. Isaac Walton was dressed in a pair of patent wading boots and a cork helmet, Pocahontas flirting with a Japanese fan, Michelangelo in a bicycle suit and a gray wig and beard, Xanthippe wearing a red cheesecloth waist, tight-fitting, with apron and white mob-cap, and carrying a fire-shovel with which to coerce the unfortunate Socrates, who was gloomily enshrouded in an appropriate black domino.
N. B. The costumes were not meant to be burlesque, and the whole thing was serious, very serious to the performers, and mainly so to the audience, except to me. Diogenes was wrapped in a Navajo blanket. Leif Ericson was dressed in an astonishing costume decorated with feathers and scalps, his feet covered with Indian moccasins, and a lady's white ruche tied round each ankle. Emma Abbott, Nielsen, and Jenny Lynn each sang songs, Joan of Arc appeared in knickerbockers and boots, carrying the cover of a wash-boiler, Miriam led her Jewish maidens on deck, one of them merrily playing on a banjo, and so on. During the intermission, as this was professedly a semi-religious affair, the orchestra, which consisted of two fiddles and a horn, played an anthem, and finished with the Hallelujah Chorus, the Hallelujah portion being taken by the melancholy trombone.
I said at the close that I had learned more in one brief evening than I ever thought possible. I knew more about ancient costumes than ever before. This is a description of one of the most primitive towns I ever ministered to, which I take from a letter written at the time. It is a frontier cattle town of the kind you read about in dime novels, if you ever read any. It consists of one long straggling street, lined on both sides with frame stores, saloons, and gambling dens, mostly unpainted. There are twelve saloons on the street, and only about three hundred people in the town. Faro, Kino, Craps, and every other kind of gambling games are going on at full blast, and with no attempt at concealment.
There, every man you meet carries a .45, i.e., a .45 caliber revolver, and a belt of cartridges at his waist. I stayed at the Grand Central. The magnificence of the name and the comforts of the hotel are in an inverse ratio to each other. The rooms are tiny, and the partitions thin boards or canvas screens. Therefore the conversations are audible and forcible. I asked for toast last night at supper, and had the pleasure of hearing the cook inquire, What in does a blank dude preacher want toast at night for? Tell him he can't have it. I ain't given out no toast to nobody at this hour. If I had known how he would have taken it, I would have starved before I asked for it. There is not a tree in the town, and no grass.
I know places where not even the cottonwood would grow, in spite of the fact that the ground around the trees, for ten feet in every direction, was ploughed up and watered regularly. The streets are as hard as iron. It has not rained for months. Water, however, does not appear to be in demand. Very few drink it, and not many wash. The day before I arrived, three desperadoes broke out of the jail after killing a guard, armed themselves, and fled. The sheriff and a posse made up of all the male citizens, and a few of the female, immediately started in pursuit, overtook them, fought them, killed two of them, and wounded another desperately. One of the deputy sheriffs had his arm blown off in the fight.
This was looked upon as quite an ordinary affair, exciting little comment, and only elicited a brief notice in the weekly newspaper, with a significant warning to the rest of the prisoners in the jail to stay there until they were released. I should think they would stay. I never felt so peaceable in my life. I really have no desire to quarrel with anyone. The church is an unsealed, unsheathed wooden building, unpainted also, the only church in town. Everybody nearly comes to church to services. They look upon it as an intellectual diversion, perhaps, and as a relief from the monotony of Pharaoh, at which they always lose. This morning, while waiting for service time, I stood in the big general store and watched the scene.
It struck me as something incongruous to see a six-foot man, bearded like the pard, with a mustache, fierce enough for Don Cesar de Bazan, with a red flannel shirt on, and armed with the usual forty-five, selling baby clothes. It amused me inwardly, but I assure you I was grave outwardly. As I stood by and watched the transaction, I could not have expressed my real feelings for the whole store. Most of the clerks were as piratical-looking as the one mentioned, and most of the customers ditto. There was a street-fight this morning between two ruffians about a claim in which one was badly used up. The monotony of the landscape was also broken by the attempt of a famous buck-jumper to conquer an equally famous bronco.
The man finally won, but it was after a struggle which almost beggars description. They tell me that it is very quiet here, and that I should see the city on Saturday and Sunday, when the boys are in from the range. Heaven forbid! It has been bitter cold all day and night, and is about a hundred degrees this morning. The wind blew a simoon from the south all day Thursday, and it was as hot as India's coral strand. On Friday, a norther swept down upon us, and the temperature makes one think of Greenland's icy mountains. The inhabitants themselves remind me of another line of that old missionary hymn. We know not what the weather will be later on. It has not yet developed. Many of the inhabitants live in dug-outs, some in sod houses, with here and there a lonesome, staring, ambitious, wretched little queen-anne cottage unpainted.
This did not seem a very promising field for the church, yet we subsequently succeeded in establishing services, and now the mission is thriving, and the character of the town is entirely changed. One of my Sunday circuits necessitated a start from my home at one o'clock on Saturday afternoon. By continuous traveling, I would reach my first point at seven o'clock Sunday morning. Services were at half-past seven in a pretty little farm church, several miles from the station, built right out in the fields. This church was afterwards destroyed by a cyclone. The farmers who made up the congregation had no money, but they had land, and each one of them planted one acre of their best land in wheat, which was to be harvested and sold for the new church.
The crops failed. Next year they planted two acres. The crops failed again. In the third year, they planted three acres, and had a fine harvest, the proceeds of which they religiously set aside for the new church-building fund, which presently enabled them to replace the wrecked building. Such perseverance I have not often seen. Every time they lost, they doubled the stakes on the Lord's side till they won. After that early service, which, be it remembered, they only had once in about five or six weeks, I drove or rode to a little town nine miles away. The church people in that town were of a different sort, and I frequently had to sweep and dust out the building, and in winter kindle the fire myself, besides ringing the church bell, which was a very large hand affair, such as auctioneers or small restaurant-keepers use.
I have often stood on the street and swung that bell until I could gather some sort of a congregation. This was only at first, however, for later the people waked up and did what was proper. When that service was over, I would get a lunch packed in a little basket. At first I had it packed at a hotel, but afterwards the people did it for me, and very nice lunches they were. Armed with my little basket, I would drive twelve miles to another town, holding a service there about two o'clock, after which I would take the afternoon train for my fourth station and service at night. Sometimes, not always, but almost every other time, I would have to ride between twenty and thirty miles to catch another train, and this would compel me to get up about two o'clock in the morning.
Those were hustling times. Though an Eastern man, I learned to hustle with the rest, so much so, in fact, that I have never been able to get out of the habit, and I was recently told, therefore, that I was too Western for a civilized diocese. Speaking of lunches put up for me, nothing could exceed the generosity of the people with what they had. I used to reach home generally feeling and looking like a truck wagon. Pots of jam, the omnipresent preserves, they were worse on preserves out there than a New Englander is with his pie, jars of pickled onions, fruit, loaves of homemade bread. I carried them all home. But my crowning achievement was the transportation of several pounds of Scrapple for five days over a thousand miles of country.
There was only one place in eighty thousand square miles of territory in which that delectable compound was made by an old Pennsylvania friend of mine, and I was determined to get it home. I succeeded, but the oleaginous concoction ruined my grip. One of the churches I mentioned, a moment since, had been built by an English farm colony, which, as its members knew nothing of farming, came quickly to grief. The pretty little building stood alone on the prairie, utterly useless. One fine day, we raced it on wheels, hitched teams to it, and hauled it some twenty miles over the prairie, fortunately there were no water-courses intervening, to a little town. where it found a permanent abiding place and did good service.
We often moved church buildings over the country, following the people after busted booms had forced them into other localities. When I stayed longer than an hour or two in any place, I always told the people to have as many services as they liked, that I would conduct them and preach at all of them. As many of them only had services when I would come to them, once every six weeks or so, they often availed themselves of my permission, and sometimes astonished me by the number of occasions for preaching and services that were invented. After I had succeeded in working up two or three missions in any neighborhood, to a partially self-supporting basis, the bishop would get a little money from the east and add to it what the people could provide, and we would put a resident missionary in the field.
In fact, that was my chief duty. I was only to break up the ground and prepare the way, a sort of ecclesiastical pioneer. But there were some places that were too poor or too far away ever to be combined, and these I took care of all the time. Train robberies and bank robberies were frequent. We were used to them. I remember the wife and daughter of a friend of mine, an army officer stationed on the frontier, were going east. As the train started out of Chicago, they heard sounds like pistol shots from the roadside. The woman and her daughter immediately dropped to the floor between the seats of the pullman, and crouched down, remaining thus concealed, until they saw they were attracting a great deal of attention from the amused passengers.
When they were asked for an explanation of their singular conduct, they could only say that they thought that it was a hold-up of the train, and they were doing as they had been taught. I was at Coffeyville a day or two after the famous raid by the Daltons, in which all the raiders were killed except one who was desperately wounded and captured. In the action, several of the citizens lost their lives as well. The town for months after was in a state of siege. Every man had a Winchester in his office or store, and it was almost as much as his life was worth for a suspicious character to enter a bank. Revolvers were sprinkled everywhere. In one little town, where there was but one bank, two men rode into town in the morning, walked into the bank, shot the president dead, mortally wounded the cashier, the clerk fortunately for him being at the post office.
The men seized all the available cash inside the counter and rode off. They were immediately pursued by the citizens, led by the city marshal. The robbers, hard pressed, took shelter in a coolie or gully. They had chosen a strong position for defense, and had put one or two bullets into some careless and reckless citizens before they were discovered. The coolie, which was a very short one, filled with dry wood and underbrush, was immediately surrounded by the posse. After a consultation, they sent back to town for several barrels of oil. which they poured down the ravine from the hill, or the inside inn, and then set fire to the mass. The bank robbers stood it as long as they could, and came staggering out of the opening, blinded by the smoke, firing irregularly.
They wounded one man, but were promptly lassoed and deprived of their weapons. Trial was dispensed with, and the prisoners were mounted on the tail of a wagon, a noose was cast about each man's neck, and the ends of the ropes fastened to the limb of a stumpy tree. "'Got anything to say before you die?' asked the marshal grimly. "'Nothing,' said the leader of the band of two, a boy of twenty-one years of age. "'We did it. I shot the cashier myself. We'll show you that we ain't afraid of you. We only want you to tell the boys that we died game.'" "'We'll do it,' said the marshal appreciatively. "'Get up,' he laconically shouted to the broncho, and that was all.
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9 08 - Chapter 8 15:10
To turn to lighter themes, I had a wedding one day at another frontier town. There was no church there, and as we sat waiting for the bride and groom to come into the parlour, some of the men present began giving personal reminiscences of their own weddings. One man speaking thus, When I was married, nothing would do, my old woman, but that I must have a pair of white kids. She'd been raised right, back east, and she knowed they was the proper thing. Kids on them things, boys, he said, bursting into deep laughter, and exhibiting a pair of red hands that would have consorted well with the physique of a Samson. Just think of it. But I sent east for em, and got em, too. It took some time, and we had to put off the weddin', for they had to make a special size, and when the weddin' night come, I worked for an hour gettin' em on, busted em to pieces before I got through, and gosh, I sweat like a roped steer.
But my wife, she said, ragged or not ragged, it was the finest weddin' in the territory, cause nobody had never been married in kids there before. The bride, who was a head taller than the groom, was a bold, vigorous, red-faced, masculine-looking woman, while the groom was a rather timid, sallow little man. She said she was twenty-two, and he was twenty-one. It was midsummer, and as they stood under the hanging lamp, the perspiration poured off the bride's face in streams. When we came to that part of the service in which the woman promises to obey her husband to be, there was a pause. The big bride looked down on the little groom, and evidently felt the incongruity of the situation. "'Can't you let that pass, parson?' she whispered pleadingly.
I was inexorable, however, so she finally complied with the requirements, but with an exceedingly bad grace, and we finished the service. I think the company were all surprised that I did not kiss the bride, but I remembered a story told me by another missionary to the effect that on a similar occasion he did kiss the bride, whereupon the husband became abusive and threatened him, at which the lady promptly interfered. Laying aside her bridal veil and catching her husband by the shoulder, she shook him vigorously, remarking at the same time that she didn't allow no man to interfere with her religious privileges, even if he was married to her. At a wedding rehearsal once, the groom, not usually an ornament, though a necessary appanage, was wondering where he should go and what he should do.
"'Oh,' said the best man, "'Nobody cares what you do and where you go.' His intended simpered, looked longingly at him, smiled weakly, and remarked boldly, "'The bride cares!' Occasionally I attended other weddings. The first time I did so, I happened to sit by a very bright woman who said to me when I remarked that this was the first wedding I had ever seen outside of an Episcopal Church, "'Oh, you Episcopalians never see anything outside of your own church anyway!' She was the mother of a delicious little tot, who concluded her baby prayers in this original way, and, please, God, take care of everybody, and, O God, take care of yourself, for you know you are the boss of us all. There was a little town, which I will call X, where they had built a nice little church and rectory.
Just as they fancied themselves on secure foundation, trouble began. Two of the vestrymen quarrelled over the wife of another, and one of the combatants shot the other dead on the public street. The murderer is now serving a life sentence in the penitentiary, capital punishment not being the custom in that commonwealth, for his crime, and the woman has gone I know not where. This was a staggering blow for the little church, and it was followed by another. For the building was shortly afterwards destroyed by a cyclone, which wiped out about one half of the town, by the way, and they had no insurance. There were but two or three men left, and a dozen women and some children, who remained connected with the mission.
They had no services, except very occasional ones from me, yet they immediately began to raise money for another church building. One of the men still in connection with the mission was a banker. By hard work, the women had raised some three hundred dollars, which had been deposited in the bank of this man. In one of the seasons of panic, the bank failed, and they lost everything. It will hardly be believed, but these indomitable women, with no men to help them this time, began their efforts again, efforts which have finally been crowned with well-deserved success. This is the kind of stuff the people are made of out there. It requires the most unbounded enthusiasm and determination, the most unyielding perseverance and courage to be a pioneer in anything, whether it be breaking up a farm or establishing a church.
It was in that town that I attended a union meeting in which one of the ministers began his prayer with words of thanksgiving for the thoughts thunk to-night. And it was near that place also that I was delivering an address before a body of old soldiers, when I was greeted with roars of laughter, the cause of which I was ignorant of, until I was told by friends that I had gravely announced myself as the son of a soldier father, and the daughter of a soldier mother. The people were not always faithful to the church, however, for I remember one little town which had been more or less abandoned for twelve years. I could not find a single member of the church left, except one old lady who had been bedridden for a number of years.
Yes, she said, in answer to my inquiry. I'm still a member of the Episcopal Church, I reckon. We did have about a dozen members once. There was, and she called over a number of names. I interrupted her in each case by asking what had become of the person mentioned. She's joined the Latter-day Saints, was the answer when the subject of my question was neither removed nor died. It seems to me that everybody has joined the Latter-day Saints, I commented. Yes, she replied. Most everyone. They had a revival here and got them all except me. Why didn't they get you, I asked. I reckon because I was bedridden and could not get out where they could get at me, she answered frankly. One day, the bishop inadvertently sent two clergymen to conduct services and preach in a certain church at the same time on Sunday morning.
Both were very old men, and each one was fond of preaching. As they were on the retired list, they did not have frequent opportunities for doing so. Each was much surprised to see the other at the church. They had no difficulty, however, in dividing the services between them, but the question as to who was to preach was a harder problem. Each man had made up his mind that he would do the preaching, and the other would not enjoy the opportunity. The services went on smoothly enough until the singing of the last verse of the hymn, which comes before the sermon. During the singing, the younger of the venerable brethren stepped out from his seat and openly knelt down in the sight of everybody for his preliminary prayer, which he concluded in much less time than usual, lest he should be caught napping, and then he rose and turned to the pulpit.
The older man, for the nonce, had dispensed with his private prayers, and as soon as his brother cleric had knelt down, he had promptly walked into the pulpit. As the younger preacher stood looking at his rival in open-mouthed astonishment and consternation, the old man bowed gracefully to him, and, turning to the congregation, triumphantly began his sermon. From old men to children is a long step to take. I had one little friend who was devotedly attached to my son, and he never succeeded in referring to me in any other way than as Mr. Brady's little boy's papa. I came home from church late one evening, and found my wife seated on the porch. I was met with the request that I go upstairs and straighten out the children, who had been sent to bed long since, but had not gone to sleep.
I found one of them lying on the bed, her feet drawn up and concealed in her nightgown, and the other sitting in a constrained position on the floor in the same way. "'What's all the trouble?' I asked. "'Sister won't say her prayers,' remarked the boy. "'I did say them,' answered the little girl promptly. "'Well, you didn't say them to me,' he persisted. "'I said them to God,' she replied triumphantly, "'and you didn't say yours to anybody.'" She's gone to bed with her clothes on, retorted the little boy, attempting to get back on account of this master stroke. So's he, replied the girl. I examined them, and found that they had slipped their nightgowns on over their clothes, and when I asked the reason why, I learned that each had refused to unbutton the other on account of the difficulty about the saying of prayers.
It was a theological problem which I found it not easy to unravel. It was another little boy of my acquaintance who said to his mother, when she was about to chastise him upon that part of his anatomy especially appointed for the purpose, "'Oh, Mama, won't you please distribute it a little?' There was a certain little girl who belonged to a Sunday-school class in a faraway prairie village. When I visited the mission, I heard several of the little girls recite the catechism. Afterwards, I baptized some of them, and then invested each one of them with a little silver cross, made them a pleasant little speech, and finished by giving each one of them a kiss. After I had left the town, their teacher was telling them about crosses in general, and the sign of the cross and baptism in particular.
Yes, children, she said. As long as you are good, that cross the archdeacon made on your forehead shines brightly, and Jesus sees it. But when you are not good, it grows dim, and if you continue to be very bad, it finally fades away. My! said one sweet little miss, you can almost see the cross on Mr. Brady's forehead now yourself, can't you? I think I have never received such a genuine, if utterly undeserved, compliment, nor one that touched me more. From children to lunatics is another long backward leap. I remember a clerical friend of mine who was visiting an old schoolmate who happened to be the curator of a lunatic asylum. As a special favour, my friend was taken by his friend into that portion of the asylum in which the dangerous cases were kept and to which ordinary visitors were not allowed access.
He was instructed before entering the different cells as to the nature of each case, and told what he must do. He was informed, before one door, that the man he was about to see was only violent when he was disagreed with. Many men who are popularly supposed to be entirely sane are similarly affected, especially husbands. and that he must acquiesce in everything that was said under penalty of fearful possibilities. He promised faithfully so to do. The lunatic, who was a rather nice-looking old man, apparently perfectly sane, entered upon a conversation with a clergyman at once. He surprised the minister by remarking, "'I suppose you saw that President Cleveland had been impeached the other day for stealing.' Yes, was the reply, very faintly delivered.
What a pity it is that the Washington Monument was blown up by dynamite by the Strikers the other day, isn't it, was the next question. An awful pity, said the perspiring clergyman. And I am so glad that the Queen of England is dead, so she can give her son a chance to reign, aren't you? continued the old man. "'Oh, yes, yes, certainly. It was time for her to die,' the clergyman answered desperately. The old man stopped, looked earnestly at his embarrassed visitor, and remarked suavely, "'Didn't you say you were a clergyman when you came here?' "'Yes,' said our friend brightly. It was the only truthful thing he had had an opportunity to say during the interview. He was astonished, however, when the lunatic said quietly—' Well, sir, for a preacher, you are the biggest liar I ever saw.
Tableau Speaking of liars reminds me of a little incident. There was a certain man in a certain mission who rarely ever contributed anything to the support of the mission. There are many similar men in all missions. He always sat in the rear of the church, and nobody knew of his practice except the man who took up the collection. He told me. The warden was rather long in receiving the offering one day, and I turned around to see what was the matter. It happened that the man had come in very late, and before he knew it, the usher had placed him upon the front seat. My eye, and his eye, and the almsbasin, all struck the same point at the same time. As usual, he put nothing in it, but not as usual, he blushed violently when he saw that I had noticed it.
The next day, I went to his dry-goods store to buy something. My purchase amounted to a dollar or two. I paid for it, started away with it, and then recollected that I had been told to get another spool of thread, or something of that kind, the cost of which was about ten cents. He tied up the new parcel for me, and when I handed him the money, he pushed it back with a wave a la podsnap, and this remark. I happened to be caught in an embarrassing situation yesterday morning in church, which was true. I forgot to bring my usual collection, which was not true, so I want to donate this little spool of thread as an offering to the Lord. The next time I came to that town, I preached on Ananias and Sapphira, and the man did not come back to church for six months.
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10 09 - Chapter 9 20:58
Recreation and instruction are combined in a very effective way in the great Chautauqua assemblies, which are held in the West, and which seem to find a more congenial environment there than in the East. Some of the ablest addresses, the finest sermons, the most interesting lectures I have ever heard, have been delivered at these assemblies. They are attended by whole families, but of course crowds of young people predominate. A local druggist in a town near which one of the principal assemblies used to meet remarked to me one day that he had made every preparation for the coming Chautauqua, and was ready for it, He was not of a literary turn of mind, and as I was curious to know, I asked him what his preparations consisted of.
"'Doctor,' he replied impressively, "'I have laid in six thousand pieces of chewing gum.' I think he sold them all before the session closed. I suppose that chewing gum was considered an aid to meditation. The maxillary motion seems to have a stimulating effect on the mind.' That reminds me of a clerical friend of mine who had a fatal fluency in speech. His sermons were torrents of verbosity. He was asked how he managed it. Why, he replied gravely, I get my mind fixed upon a subject, and then I just unconsciously cerebrate and keep my jaws moving. I think that chewing gum would have been an assistance to him. A sense of humor, too, would have helped him. Speaking of cerebration reminds me of an achievement performed by a scientific little giant well known and loved throughout the West for his successful grappling with the chinch-bug problem.
I suppose there are millions of people who have never heard of the chinch-bug. On the other hand, there are several millions who know him intimately to their very great sorrow. The vicious little insect, which the Century Dictionary calls a certain fetid American hemipterous insect of the genus Blesus, is a little bug about an eighth of an inch long, grayish-black in color, with white markings. They literally swarm in the wheat and corn-fields by the millions. They crawl through a field with remarkable rapidity, and the line of their devastating advance is as clearly marked as if the grain was being cut by a machine. For a long time, the farmers were helpless before their attack. Dr. Francis H.
Snow, the Chancellor of the University of Kansas, an entomologist of worldwide reputation—that is, he is known everywhere except in the East, where there are no schinch bugs—after a long course of brilliant experiments, discovered the method of inoculating the bug with a deadly and very contagious disease. He also discovered the disease. He then conceived the brilliant idea of distributing a few of the inoculated insects in a field where the destroying armies had made their appearance, and, wonderful to relate, the experiment proved to be a great success. An epidemic of disease, superinduced by the few inoculated insects, swept through the chinch-bugs and saved that particular crop. His work, which comprised not only the discovery of the disease, but the method of artificial inoculation and propagation, and the preservation of the inoculated bugs during the long winter season, so that he might have a supply on hand with which to begin the summer campaign, was one of the most beneficial of the gifts of science to the welfare of humanity.
The money value of property saved by his labors, freely and ungrudgingly given, amounts to millions of dollars, an enormous sum. The experiments of several years have shown that upward of seventy per cent of the fields operated upon have been saved, and the cases of failure are due to local causes which are beyond control. During the busy season, the farmers send in boxes of live bugs to the university and receive in return by mail a sufficient number of the inoculated insects to do the work. A field in the grasp of the cinch-bugs is a horrible sight. Where they have been, the stalks wither and rot, and the inevitableness of their rapid attack upon the remainder of the field, covered with tufted heads of wheat or broad corn-leaves waving in the breeze, is a painful spectacle.
If you examine the line of attack closely, you will see that each stalk is fairly blanketed, with these loathsome little pests sucking the life-blood out of it. A great big cornstalk, shivering under the drain of these insects, looks like a human being in agony. There was a man once in a little town I visited who kept a general store. He was approached one morning by a farmer who was indebted to him in some small amount, with a request for an extension of time, on the plea that the cinch-bugs were in the farmer's corn and that his crop was being ruined. "'Cinch-bugs? Nonsense!' exclaimed the storekeeper rudely. "'I don't believe there is a cinch-bug within a mile of your field.' "'They are there, by millions, I tell you.' "'Millions!' cried the storekeeper incredulously.
"'I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a dollar and a half a gallon for every gallon of the bugs you bring in to me.' "'Done,' replied the debtor. There were several witnesses to the bargain, and without saying a word, the farmer turned and walked out. A day or two after, he drove back to the village with a large ten-gallon can, tightly covered, which he unloaded from his wagon, and rolled carefully into the general store. There were the usual number of country idlers in the store at the time, who were interested witnesses of the conversation that ensued. "'What have you there?' asked the merchant suspiciously. "'Something for you.' "'What is it?' "'Cinch-bugs,' answered the farmer, calmly lifting the lid and showing the can, completely filled with a horrible mass of the hideous insects, tumbling and wriggling like mad.
"'There's ten-gallon of them,' he continued, "'and I take it that you owe me fifteen dollars for the lot. That will just about square my little bill, and I will thank you to give me a receipt for it.' "'Covered up quick, for goodness sake, before any of them get away,' hastily remarked the astonished shopman, amid the uproarious laughter of the bystanders. Then, after asking if the contents clear through were in accordance with the top layer, and receiving an affirmative answer, declining a suggestion that he could examine the case and see for himself, the merchant went back and gravely wrote out the receipt. That was all the farmer got out of his wheat field that year, too. The story was too good to keep.
It got into the local papers and was quoted all over the state. Every male brought letters of inquiry to the unfortunate shopkeeper, asking for his latest quotation on cinch-bugs, and whether he paid the freight or wanted them delivered F.O.B., how he would have them shipped, and so on. He was dismayed at first, but he said afterwards that he believed that he had received a thousand dollars' worth of free advertising out of the incident, so he was content. The farmer had simply taken his boys into the field with tin cans, and they had stripped stock after stock, and had no difficulty in getting the amount that they brought in. It is not safe to make statements without considering the consequences.
I have heard of an eminent bishop, a southern bishop renowned for his wit, who came north, shortly after the close of the War of the Rebellion, to get some money to carry on the missionary work of his sadly shattered diocese. He had succeeded in securing a tentative promise of $10,000 from a certain wealthy individual with whom he was to dine that evening, in company with a number of other guests. One of the company, with incredible rudeness, asked the bishop during the course of the dinner how they felt down south at being licked. I think he must have been drinking. The bishop, like the gentleman he was, parried the question, but the questioner persisted in his desire, and attracted the attention finally of the whole table to his query.
The bishop was human, Most bishops who are worth anything are, and he finally lost his temper. "'You ask me, my young friend, how we feel down south, at having been, as you say, licked?' he said, with urbane courtesy. "'Yes, sir.' "'Well, sir, I will tell you, we feel like Lazarus.' "'Like Lazarus, eh?' "'Pretty poor, asking for crumbs,' replied the other, chuckling at his own humor. "'No, sir,' answered the bishop. "'I do not refer to that phase of his character.' "'What, then?' "'Why, Lazarus was licked by a dog, sir. We can sympathize with him, sir.' It was a brilliant and well-deserved bit of repartee, but it lost the bishop his ten thousand dollars. If I had been the intending donor, I think I would have given him twenty thousand dollars for his pluck and his wit.' Speaking of bishops reminds me of another bishop who was entertaining a modest young friend of his from the country at a hotel conducted on the European plan.
The bishop was suffering from indigestion. It is a chronic complaint with bishops and traveling missionaries in general. They have to eat so many different things in so many different places that it is a wonder that they have any stomachs left. The bishop had ordered for himself a large bowl of milk-toast. There was nothing the matter with the digestive apparatus of the bishop's visitor, but in the presence of a long and elaborate menu in a foreign language, he felt somewhat undecided, and while the bishop was otherwise engaged for the moment, he whispered to the waiter to bring him the same things the bishop had ordered. What was his amazement and disappointment, and the bishop's surprise as well, when a few minutes later, the waiter brought in two large bowls of milk toast, one of which was put at his place instead of the tempting repast which he had anticipated.
One of the most interesting characters, and one of the finest Christians that I ever came across in my Western life, was General Guy V. Henry of the United States Army, recently deceased. He was then only a colonel of cavalry. He had one of the downstairs rooms in that same boarding-house in which I was an inmate with the dean to whom I have referred in the first paper. The maidservants of the house slept in a small room off the kitchen, which was a basement affair. The house was a four-storied one, and I lived in the garret. About two o'clock one morning, everyone in the house was awakened by a series of the wildest shrieks proceeding from the basement. I never heard such a commotion. The maids rushed up into the hall in a state of frantic terror, screaming that there was a burglar in the house, and that their room had been entered.
I sprang out of bed, dragged on a pair of trousers, seized the poker, Tore down the stairs, and reached the kitchen, as I was the youngest of the men in the house, before any of the others. The window was open. The ground outside was just on a level with the window-sill. Gallantly clutching the poker, I climbed through the window and ran down the yard to the back fence. It was a bright, moonlight night, and the burglar was just disappearing around the corner. There was nothing I could do, so I waved the poker threateningly at him, Climbed off the fence and started back to the house. When I reached the window, I dropped to my knees and prepared to crawl through to the kitchen. Just as I thrust my head into the darkness of the room, I felt a round, ice-cold piece of steel firmly pressed against my right temple, and a voice as cold and hard as the barrel of the pistol sternly directed me to remain perfectly quiet and make no noise, else I would get the top of my head blown off.
The Sphinx itself would be a vibrant creature beside me at that moment. I was as immobile as a pyramid, notwithstanding the fact that my heart was beating like a trip-hammer. The cold voice called for a light, and when the gas was ignited, an iron hand was applied to the collar of my night-shirt, and I was dragged inboard. "'Good heaven!' said the colonel, starting back in astonishment, but still keeping his pistol pointed at my head. "'This is a fine position for a theological student to be in. What are you doing here at this hour?' It took the hardest kind of explaining to convince the colonel that I had come down there as a knight-errant to rescue the maids, and was not the burglar. When I had succeeded in convincing him that I was innocent, he remarked, "'Well, I don't see why you did not say who you were before.' I replied that nothing on earth would have induced me to open my mouth under the circumstances, that he had told me to keep quiet, and with the barrel of his revolver at my head, I fully intended to do so.
The colonel was one of the manliest and gentlest men I have ever met, and as versatile as he was brave. There was a young couple in the house who had a baby. They were too poor to have a nurse, and were therefore deprived of the pleasure of attending church together. They were a very devout pair, and their inability to be away from the baby at the same time was a great deprivation to them. On Sunday evenings, not once but often, I have known Colonel Henry to slip away from his family, and go upstairs and take the baby and care for it the whole evening, so that these two young people could go to church together. He was as good a nurse as he was a soldier, though some of his methods and remedies were certainly peculiar.
I remember seeing him on one occasion, after services, rocking to and fro, holding the baby clasped tightly against his breast, and when he was asked if the infant had behaved itself, he replied, No, it did not. Not at first, that is. It seemed to have some kind of a cramp, or the colic, but I fixed it all right. What did you do for it, Colonel? "'Well, I have some fine old Holland gin down in my room, and I gave him a good dose of it, and you see the result.' "'Heavens!' exclaimed the young mother, in a fright, clasping the infant to her breast. "'Maybe you have killed it.' "'No, I haven't,' replied the colonel imperturbably. "'It's all right. I have not been in command of a regiment of men for ten years without knowing how to take care of a baby, madam.' The man had been shot to pieces in the Indian Wars.
Some of the bones in his face were supported by artificial plates. He was a scarred and battle-worn veteran. The story of his exploits stirs the blood. He looked his career, too, and there was a strange contrast in the picture presented by the dashing, brilliant soldier calmly nursing the little baby. Colonel Henry bore a prominent part in the Spanish-American War, and was the first governor of Puerto Rico. He came to see me in the cabin of a government transport off San Juan, where I was lying deathly ill with camp and typhoid fever contracted in the service. I was miserably sick, but not too sick to read, in the dreadfully wasted appearance of the stern-featured, kindly old soldier, who said words of encouragement and greeting to me that he himself was in a bad way.
He stuck it out, in spite of every entreaty from his friends and the advice of his surgeon, until he had accomplished his task and had been relieved at the close of his tour of duty. Then he came home, and quietly folded up his hands, and died, like the soldier and gentleman that he was, without complaint, and without parade. He just as truly died for his country, as if one of the many bullets which had stricken him down in some of the many fields in the rebellion and Indian wars, in which he had been in action, had ended his life. He was one of the humblest and most thorough-going Christians that I ever knew. I remember many times his telling me of the church services that he had conducted. The march was never so hard, the pursuit never so hurried, the cold never so bitter, the heat never so burning, the danger never so imminent, but that he would find time to take out his little warm prayer-book and read the service of his church.
God bless him! Peace and rest to his memory. He was not the only hero I ever knew. The world is full of heroes, and this was a humble one, but he fairly came in the class. He was a conductor on one of the railroads upon which I frequently traveled, and I knew him very well. My first impression of him was that he was a widower. I knew he had one son, a lad of whom he was very fond. The boy was attending school at a country college in a little town, through which the railroad ran. The youngster was always brought down to the station, on the arrival of the train, every other day, for a word or two of greeting with his father. When his duty permitted, the conductor used to sit down in the seat by me and talk about his boy.
The man lived for the child alone. He saved his money for his education, and for one other purpose, and spent little or nothing upon himself. One day I noticed that his finger was roughly tied up, and I asked what was the matter. He hesitated a moment, and told me he would tell me when we passed the next station. There was a long interval after the next station before the train stopped again, and he came back to me and sat down by me. "'Well,' he began, "'you know my boy?' Yes, I replied. I think everybody on the road knows him. He's a good boy, and he had a mother once. My wife, of course. The gravity of his demeanour prevented me from smiling at his naive announcement, and I simply nodded my head.
We were as happy as could be in our home, wife and I and the lad, until one day she suddenly went crazy. I think it was in her family. And she has been crazy ever since. She is in a private retreat back in Ohio, and I took a vacation the other day and went back to see her, as I always do twice a year. Go on, I said, with growing interest. Well, sir, when I was shown into her room last week, she came toward me, and I stretched out my hand to her. Then she sprang at me and caught this finger in her teeth. He hesitated. "'Couldn't you pull it away?' I asked. "'Yes, I might have, I suppose, but she was crazy, poor thing, and she did not know what she was doing. I was afraid I would hurt her, so—' He stopped again.
"'What did you do?' "'Nothing at all, sir. I spoke to her kindly, and I just let her chew it until she got through.' She nearly bit the top off, he remarked quietly, getting up from the seat and going toward the door as the train slackened up, nearing the next station. The women, especially the wives of the clergy, were heroes, too. I have heard of one who played the little organ in the church until she was forced to resign her position, which was without emolument, on account of another baby. But a few months found her back in her old place. The baby's cradle sat by the organ now, and the faithful musician pumped the organ with one foot and rocked the baby with the other. In addition to all this, she led the singing, and it was good singing, too.
I call that heroic.
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11 10 - Chapter 10 25:13
Chapter X of Recollections of a Missionary in the Great West The love of Christmas is as strong in the West as it is in any section of the country, perhaps indeed stronger, for people who have few pleasures cherish holidays more highly than those for whom many cheap amusements are provided. But when the manifestation of the Christmas spirit is considered, there is a vast difference between the West and the East. There are vast sections of country in which evergreens do not grow, and to which it would not pay to ship them. Consequently, Christmas trees are not common, and therefore much prized when they may be had. There are no great rows, nor small clusters of inviting shops, filled with suggestive and fascinating contents.
at attractive prices. The distances from centers of trade are so great that the things which may be purchased even in the smallest towns in more favorable localities for a few cents have there almost a prohibitive price upon them. The efforts of the people to give their children a merry Christmas in the popular sense, however, are strong and sometimes pitiful. It must not be forgotten that the West is settled by Eastern people, and that no very great difference exists between them save for the advantages presented by life in the West for the higher development of character. Western people are usually brighter, quicker, more progressive and less conservative, and more liberal than those from whom they came.
The survival of the fittest is the rule out there, and the qualities of character necessary to that end are brought to the top in the strenuous life necessitated by the hardships of the frontier. If the people are not any better than they were, it is because they are still clinging to the obsolete ideas of the East. The Eastern point of view always reminds me of the reply of the bishop to the layman who was deploring the poor quality of the clergy. Yes, says the bishop, some of them are poor, but consider the stock from which they come. You see, we have nothing but laymen out of which to make them. The East never understands the West, the real West, that is, which lies beyond the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Rocky Mountains.
They know nothing of its ideas, its capacities, its possibilities, its educational facilities, its culture, its real power in the East. and they do not wish to learn, apparently. The Easterners fatuously think, like Job, that they are the people and wisdom will die with them. Some years since, an article in the forum on the theme Kansas more civilized than New York conclusively proved the proposition to the satisfaction of the present writer at least. I sat at a dinner-table one day, when the salted almonds were handed me with the remark, "'I suppose you never saw anything like these out west. Try some.' And my wife was quite gravely asked if we feared any raids by the Indians, and if they troubled us by their marauding in Kansas.
I have found it necessary to inform the curious that we did not live in tepees or wigwams in Nebraska." One day I was talking with a man, and a very stupid man at that, who informed me that he graduated from Harvard, to which surprising statement he added the startling information, for the benefit of my presumably untutored Occidental mind, that it was a college near Boston. They have everything in the West that the East has, so far as their sometimes limited means will provide them, and when they have no money, they have patience, endurance, grim determination, and courage, which are better than money in the long run. The cities, and smaller towns especially, as a rule are cleaner, better governed, more progressive, better provided with improvements and comforts than corresponding places in the East.
Scarcely a community exists without its waterworks, electric-light plant, telephone system, trolleys, paved streets, etc. Of course, this does not apply to the extreme frontier in which my field of work largely lay. The conditions were different there. The people, too. But to return to Christmas. One Christmas Day, I left my family at one o'clock in the morning. Christmas salutations were exchanged at that very sleepy hour, and I took the fast express to a certain station, whence I could drive up country to a little church on a farm in which there had never been a Christmas service. It was a bitter cold morning, deep snow on the ground, and a furious north wind raging. The climate is variable indeed out west.
I have spent Christmas days on which it rained all day. And of all days in the year on which to have it rain, Christmas is the worst. Still, the farmers would be thankful. It was usually safe to be thankful out there whenever it rained. I knew a man once who said you could make a fortune by always betting two to one that it would not rain, no matter what the present promise of the weather was. You were bound to win nine times out of ten. I hired a good sleigh and two horses, and drove to my destination. The church was a little old brick building right out in the prairie. There was a smouldering fire in a miserable worn-out stove, which hardly raised the temperature of the room a degree, although it filled the place with smoke.
The wind had free entrance through the ill-fitting window and door frames, and a little pile of snow formed on the altar during the service. I think there were twelve people who had braved the fury of the storm. There was not an evergreen within a hundred miles of the place, and the only decoration was sagebrush. To wear vestments was impossible, and I conducted the service in a buffalo overcoat and a fur cap and gloves, as I have often done. It was short, and the sermon was shorter. After service, I went to dinner at the nearest farmhouse. Such a Christmas dinner it was. There was no turkey, and they did not even have a chicken. The menu was cornbread, ham and potatoes, and few potatoes at that.
There were two children in the family, a girl of six and a boy of five. They were glad enough to get the ham. Their usual bill of fare was composed of potatoes and cornbread, and sometimes cornbread alone. My wife had put up a lunch for me, fearing that I might not be able to get anything to eat, in which there was a small mince-pie turnover, and the children had slipped a small box of candy in my bag as a Christmas gift. I produced a turnover, which by common consent was divided between the astonished children. Such a glistening of eyes and smacking of small lips you never saw. This pie makes it seem like Christmas after all," said the little girl, with her mouth full. Yes," said the boy, ditto, that and the ham.
We didn't have any Christmas this year, continued the small maiden. Last year, mother made us some potato men, i.e., little animal and semi-human figures made out of potatoes and matches, with buttons for eyes. They go into many stockings among the very poor out west. But this year, interrupted the boy, potatoes are so scarce that we couldn't have em. Mother says that next year, perhaps we will have some real Christmas. They were so brave about it that my heart went out to them. Children, and no Christmas gifts. Only the chill bare room, the wretched meager meal. I ransacked my brain. Finally, something occurred to me. After dinner, I excused myself and hurried back to the church. There were two baskets there which were used for the collection.
Old, but rather pretty. I selected the best one. Fortunately, I had in my grip a neat little housewife, which contained a pair of scissors, a huge thimble, needles, thread, a tiny little pincushion, an emery bag, buttons, etc. I am like most ex-sailors something of a needleman myself. I emptied the contents into the collection basket, and garnished the dull little affair with the bright ribbon ties, ripped off the housewife, and went back to the house. To the boy I gave my penknife, which happened to be nearly new, and to the girl the church basket with the sewing things for a work basket. The joy of those children was one of the finest things I have ever witnessed. The face of the little girl was positively filled with awe as she lifted from the basket, one by one, the pretty and useful articles the housewife had supplied.
And when I added the small box of candy that my children had provided me, they looked at me with feelings of reverence, almost as a visible incarnation of Santa Claus. They were the cheapest and most effective Christmas presents it was ever my pleasure to bestow. I hope to be forgiven for putting the church furniture to such a secular use. Another Christmas Day, I had a funeral. There was no snow, no rain. The day was warm. The woman who had died had been the wife of one of the largest farmers in the diocese. He actually owned a continuous body of several thousand acres of fine land, much of it under cultivation. She had been a fruitful mother, and five stalwart sons, all married, and several daughters likewise, with numerous grandchildren, represented her contribution to the world's population.
They were the people of the most consideration in the little community in which they lived. We had the services in the morning in the Methodist church, which was big enough to hold about six hundred people. As it was a holiday, it was filled to the very doors. One of my farmer friends remarked as we stood on the front steps, watching the crowd assembling, "'My Doc, all of them wagons gatherin' here makes it seem more like Circus Day than a funeral.' I had been asked to preach a sermon, which I essayed to do. The confusion was terrific. In order to be present themselves, the mothers in Israel had been obliged to bring their children, and the most domestic of all attentions were being bestowed upon them freely.
They cried and wailed and expostulated with their parents, in audible tones, until I was nearly frantic. I found myself shouting consoling platitudes to a sobbing, grief-stricken band of relatives, and endeavoring to drown the noise of the children by roaring, the lion's part a la bottom. It was distracting. I was a very young minister at the time, and the perspiration fairly rained from me. That's what makes me remember it was a warm day. When we got through the services, after every one of the six hundred had, in the language of the local undertaker, viewed the remains, we went to the cemetery. I rode behind a horse which was thirty-eight years old. I do not know what his original color had been, but at present he was white and haury with age.
"'I always use him for funerals,' said the undertaker, "'because he naturally sets the proper pace for a funeral procession.' "'Mercy,' said I. "'I hope he won't die on the road.' "'Well, if he does,' continues the undertaker, "'your services will come in handy. We can bury him proper.' "'I am awfully fond of that horse. I shouldn't wonder if he hadn't been at as many as a thousand funerals in his life.' "'I thought he had all the gravity of his gruesome experiences, especially in his gait.' The Christmas dinners were all late on account of the funeral, but they were bountiful and good, nevertheless, and I much enjoyed mine. Another Christmas I was snowbound on one of the obscure branches of a western railroad.
If the train had been on time, I would have made a connection and have reached home by Christmas Eve, but it was very evident, as the day wore on, that it was not going to be on time. Indeed, it was problematical whether it would get anywhere at all. It was snowing hard outside. Our progress had become slower and slower. Finally, in a deep cut, we stopped. There were three men, one woman and two little children in the car, no other passengers in the train. The train was of that variety known out west as a plug, consisting of a combination baggage and smoker and one coach. One of the trainmen started on a lonely and somewhat dangerous tramp of several miles up the road to the next station to call for the snowplough, and the rest of us settled down to spend the night.
Certainly we could not hope to be extricated before the next evening, especially as the storm then gave no signs of abating. We all went up to the front of the car and sat around the stove, in which we kept up a bright fire, Fortunately, we had plenty of fuel, and in such circumstances we speedily got acquainted with each other. One of the men was a drummer, a travelling man for a notion house, another was a cowboy, the third was a big cattleman, and I was the last. We soon found that the woman was a widow, Who had maintained herself and the children precariously, since the death of her husband, by sewing and other feminine odd jobs, but had at last given up the unequal struggle, and was going back to live with her mother, also a widow, who had some little property.
The poor little threadbare children had cherished anticipation of a joyous Christmas with their grandmother. From their talk, we could hear that a Christmas-tree had been promised them, and all sorts of things. They were intensely disappointed at the blockade. They cried and sobbed, and would not be comforted. Fortunately, the woman had a great basket filled with substantial provisions, which, by the by, she generously shared with the rest of us, so we were none of us hungry. As the night fell, we tipped up two of the seats, Placed the bottom sideways, and with our overcoats made two good beds for the little folks. Just before they went to sleep, the drummer said to me, "'Say, parson, we've got to give these children some Christmas.' "'That's what,' said the cowboy.
"'I'm agreed,' added the cattleman. "'Madam,' said the drummer, addressing the woman with the easy assurance of his class, after a brief consultation between us, "'we are going to give your kids some Christmas.' The woman beamed at him gratefully. "'Yes, children,' said the now-enthused drummer, as he turned to the open-mouthed children. "'Santa Claus is coming round to-night, sure. We want you to hang up your stockings.' "'We ain't got none,' quivered the little girl. "'Cept in those we've got on. Ma says it's too cold to take them off.' "'I've got two new pair of woolen socks,' said the cattleman eagerly, "'which I ain't never wore, and you are welcome to them.' There was a clapping of little hands in childish glee, and then the two faces fell as the elder remarked, "'But Santa Claus will know they are not our stockings, and he will fill them with things for you instead.' "'Lord love you,' said the burly cattleman, roaring with infectious laughter.
"'He won't bring me nothing. One of us will sit up anyway and tell him it's for you. You've got to hustle to bed right away, because he may be here any time now.' Then came one of those spectacles which we sometimes meet once or twice in a lifetime. The children knelt down on the rough floor of the car beside their improvised beds. Instinctively, the hands of the men went to their heads, and at the first word of Now I lay me down to sleep, four hats came off. The cowboy stood twirling his hat and looking at the little kneeling figures. The cattleman's vision seemed dimmed, while in the eyes of the traveling man there shone a distant look, a look across snow-filled prairies to a warmly-lighted home.
The children were soon asleep. Then the rest of us engaged in earnest conversation. What should we give them, was the question. "'It don't seem to me that I've got anything to give him,' said the cowboy mournfully, "'unless the little kid might like my spurs, and I would give my gun to the little girl, though on general principles I don't like to give up a gun. You never know when you're going to need it, especially with strangers,' he added, with a rather suspicious glance at me. I would not have harmed him for the world.' "'I'm in much the same fix,' said the cattleman. "'I've got a flask of prime old whiskey here, but it don't seem like it's very appropriate for the occasion, though it's at the service of any of you gents.'" "'Never seen no occasion in which whiskey wasn't appropriate,' said the cowboy, mellowing at the sight of the flask.
"'I mean, it ain't fit for kids,' explained the cattleman, handing it over. "'I begun on it rather early,' remarked the puncher, taking a long drink, "'and I always use it when my feelin's is unsettled like now.' He handed it back with a sigh. "'Never mind, boys,' said the drummer. "'You all come along with me to the baggage-car.' So off we trooped. He opened his trunks and spread before us such a glittering array of trash and trinkets as almost took away our breath. There,' he said, Look at that. We'll just pick out the best things from the lot, and I'll donate them all. No, you don't, said the cowboy. My auntie's in on this game, and I'm going to buy what chips I want, and pay for em, too, else there ain't going to be no Christmas around here.
That's my judgment, too, said the cattleman. I think that will be fair, said I. The traveling man can donate what he pleases, and we can each of us buy what we please as well. I think we spent hours looking over the stock which the obliging man spread out all over the car for us. He was going home, he said, and everything was at our service. The trainman caught the infection, too, and all hands finally went back to the coach with such a load of stuff as you never saw before. We filled the socks and the two seats besides with it. The grateful mother was simply dazed. As we stood about gleefully surveying our handiwork, including the bulging socks, the engineer remarked, "'We've got to get some kind of a Christmas-tree.' So two of us plowed off on the prairie.
It had stopped snowing, and was bright moonlight, and wandered around till we found a good-sized piece of sage-brush, which we brought back and solemnly installed, and the woman decorated it with bunches of tissue-paper from the notion stock and clean waste from the engine. We hung the train lanterns around it. We were so excited that we actually could not sleep. The contagion of the season was strong upon us, and I know not which were the more delighted the next morning, the children or the amateur Santa Clauses, when they saw what the cowboy called the layout. Great goodness! Those children never did have, and probably never will have, such a Christmas again. And to see the thin face of that mother flush with unusual color when we handed her one of those monstrous red plush albums which we had purchased jointly, and in which we had all written our names in lieu of our photographs, and between the leaves of which the cattleman had generously slipped a hundred-dollar bill, was worth being blockaded for a dozen Christmases.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she fairly sobbed before us. During the morning, we had a little service in the car, in accordance with the custom of the church, and I am sure no more heartfelt body of worshippers ever poured forth their thanks for the Incarnation than those men, that woman, and the little children. The woman sang, Jesus, lover of my soul, from memory, in her poor little voice, and that small but reverent congregation, cowboy, drummer, cattleman, trainman, and parson, solemnly joined in. It feels just like church, said the cowboy, gravely to the cattleman. Say, I'm all broke up. Let's go in the other car and try your flask again. It was his unfailing resource for unsettled feelings.
The train-hand, who had gone on to division headquarters, returned with the snow-plough early in the afternoon, but what was more to the purpose, he brought a whole cooked turkey with him, so the children had turkey, a Christmas-tree, and Santa Claus to their hearts content. I did not get home until the day after Christmas. But after all, what a Christmas I had enjoyed! During a season of great privation, we were much assisted by barrels of clothing which were sent to us from the East. One day, just before Christmas, I was distributing the contents of several barrels of wearing apparel, and other necessities, to the women and children at a little mission. The delight of the women, as the good warm articles of clothing for themselves and their children, which they so sadly needed, were handed out to them, was touching.
But the children themselves did not enter into the joy of the occasion with the same spontaneity. Finally, just as I got to the bottom of one box, and before I had opened the other one, a little boy, sniffling to himself in the corner, remarked sotto voce, Ain't there no real Christmas gifts in there for us little fellers, too? I could quite enter into his feelings, for I could remember in my youthful days, when careful relatives had provided me with a cardigan, jacket, three handkerchiefs, and a half-dozen pairs of socks for Christmas, that the season seemed to me like a hollow mockery, and the attempt to palm off necessities as Christmas gifts filled my childish heart with disapproval. I am older now, and can face a Christmas remembrance of a cook-book, a silver cake-basket, or an ice-cream freezer, some of which I have actually received, with philosophical equanimity, if not gratitude.
I opened the second box, therefore, with a great longing, though but little hope, Heaven bless the women who had packed that box, for in addition to the usual necessary articles, there were dolls, knives, books, games galore, so that the small fry had some real Christmas gifts, as well as the others. After one of the blizzards, a young ranchman who had gone into the nearest town, came twenty miles away to get some Christmas things for his wife and little ones, was found frozen to death on Christmas morning, his poor little packages of petty Christmas gifts tightly clasped in his cold hands, lying by his side. His horse was frozen, too, and when they found it, hanging to the horn of the saddle was a little piece of an evergreen tree.
You would throw it away in contempt in the East. It was so puny. There it meant something, the love of Christmas. It was there in his dead hands, the spirit of Christmas. It showed itself in that bit of verdant pine over the lariat at the saddle-bow of the poor Bronco. Do they have Christmas out West? Well, they have it in their hearts, if no place else, and after all, that is the place above all others where it should be.
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12 11 - Chapter 11 17:19
Certainly, in every sense, the greatest man with whom I ever came in contact was the bishop of one of the Western diocese of which I was Archdeacon. We used to think that his talents were wasted in the West, and that he should have been at the head of some important university or the bishop of some great Eastern diocese. But the people among whom he ministered were entirely assured that he was the right man in the right place, and they loved him with a devotion such as few men receive. He was a Yale man, a Berkeley man, a Heidelberg man, a special student in some of the best European schools, a deep thinker, a clear expositor, a profound theologian, and a brilliant philosopher. He was able to clothe the deepest truth in the simplest form, to speak of the most profound things in so perspicuous a way that the plainest could understand.
His learning and wisdom were accompanied by more than ordinary simplicity of character and sweetness of disposition. He was a versatile man as well. Indeed, one of his professors told him, when he was a very young man, that he did too many things well ever to do anything very well. In addition to his other qualities, he was an accomplished chess-player, the champion of his college in his younger days. One day he visited a certain town in which there was a woman with several children whom she was anxious to have baptized. Her husband, who happened to be a Yale man, also had refused to consent. The bishop was a guest at her house, and she had besought him to argue the point with her husband and get his permission to baptize the children.
He was a lawyer, and pointedly refused to discuss theology with the bishop, adroitly evading the question every time it was raised. The gentleman was also a chess player, and an extraordinarily good one. He was not only the champion of the town, but of a very much wider circle, and he had discovered, or invented, a new opening not in the books. He found out that the bishop played chess, and he said he would like to try this opening upon him. The bishop knew that there were various ways to get at a man, so he consented to play a game. The opening worked beautifully, and after a rather hard struggle, the bishop was defeated. They tried it again, and this time, after a longer and harder struggle, the bishop was victorious.
A third game was decided more quickly in the bishop's favour, and in the fourth game, having mastered the opening, he swept the board. The lawyer was very much chagrined, and begged for another trial. "'No,' said the bishop, calmly, gravely pushing away the board. "'You told me you were a player when you began, but you hardly afford me common amusement. You actually do not know the first principles of the game.' which was an exaggeration, and you do not know any more about theology than you know about chess, which was quite true. The lawyer was by this time fairly indignant, and quite willing to argue or fight about chess, theology, or anything else. The next morning, bright and early, the bishop met his hostess coming down the stairs.
"'What did you do to my husband last night?' she asked eagerly. I did not do anything, madam. We had a few games of chess, and then a little theological argument. Why do you ask? Well, she said, in great glee. He came upstairs about two o'clock this morning, and waked me up, and said, Jane, I guess you'd better have the children baptized in the morning. We used to tell the bishop that he certainly had gambled for those children. One day, we were traveling across the plains in the caboose of a freight train. A young divinity student was with us. He was one of the ambitious kind of divinity students who wreck a parish or two when they begin, and finally drift upon the ecclesiastical bargain counter.
He was ready to argue about anything with anybody. A greasy, dilapidated-looking tramp came into the caboose at one of the stations at the end of a division, and presently engaged in a heated discussion with a young theologian on the disadvantages of education. He maintained the affirmative that the less a man knew, and the less education he had, the happier he was, with so much skill and adroitness, and showed such mastery of logic and literature that he routed the poor boy, horse, foot, and dragoons, so effectively, in fact, that the young man rose and went out on the platform to hide his chagrin, leaving the supposed tramp chuckling over his pipe in huge enjoyment at his easy victory. The bishop had listened without saying a word, and when the student left, he turned to the man and inquired sharply, "'What college are you from, sir?' Yale, answered the man, without thinking.
The unlucky admission completely destroyed the man's argument, for he was a living example of the fallacy of his own proposition. He was one of the engineers of the road, and afterwards a great friend of the bishop. One day, in a certain town, a certain church, not of our communion, of course, resolved to revive its formulas of belief, in other words, to make a new creed for itself and its members. In order that there might not be the slightest suggestion of ecclesiastical domination, that they might avoid the slightest appearance even, of sacerdotalism, the committee appointed to draw up the creed was composed of a lawyer, a farmer, and a merchant, all practical men, with the minister religiously, or irreligiously, excluded.
The bishop was passing along the street when the lawyer stepped out of his office and called him in. Two perplexed and embarrassed men sat at a long table, on which were placed Webster's Dictionary, a Cruden's Concordance, a Bible, a prayer-book, and the Westminster Confession. These, said the lawyer, introducing the bishop, are my colleagues on a committee to draw up a creed for our church. We have gotten as far as the Holy Ghost, and to tell the truth, as we do not any of us know anything about the Holy Ghost, we thought you might give us a little information for our articles of belief. This reminds me of a certain other church organization, which attempted to draw up a creed in the same way for the government of its members.
When the result of the labors of the committee appointed was read, there was great dissatisfaction. Some wanted more, some wanted less, and there was imminent danger of the complete disruption of the organization until the chairman of the committee arose with the delightful suggestion that they compromise. So a compromise creed was drawn up, and that particular enterprise saved from shipwreck. The bishop had a relative who was a professional man in an eastern city, and a very able man indeed, but he had unfortunately become tinged with some of the prevalent ideas of the age. He belonged to a coterie of men who thought as he, and when the bishop announced his intention of visiting him, this little club of modern thinkers determined to have some fun with the old man, in a kindly, polite way, of course, So they invited him to dinner, which was to cover a discussion in which they felt certain of coming out first best.
There was fun enough at the dinner, but the sport was in the hands of the bishop. He early detected their plan, met their attack on their own grounds, and routed them completely. One by one, they shamefacedly stole away, and the morning rose with the little bishop triumphant and alone on the field of battle. One by one, the young men came to see him during the next day, and apologized for the part they had taken, even though in spirit of harmless fun, and many of them date the change in their opinions from that hour. Everybody listened to the man. I remember once driving across the country with him, while discussing the nature of the soul. That is, the bishop was discussing. I was only prompting by a question now and then.
We were on the rear seat of a wagon, with the driver on the front seat. It was a very dark night. In the middle of the bishop's exposition, the wagon took a wild plunge, there was a crash, and over we went into the muddy ditch. I beg your pardon, gents, said the driver, who had retained control of the horses as we scrambled to our feet. I was so interested in hearing the little man discussing my immortal soul, which I hardly ever knowed that I had one before, that I clean forgot where we was and drove you plump into the ditch. I have engaged him in conversation in the same way on a railroad, and he would continue to talk on until he would wake up with a start to the fact that most of the passengers in the car had crowded around his seat and were listening.
I tell you, said a cowboy to me, after hearing a discussion on the Atonement, that little feller knows a heap about them things, don't he? One day he held a service in a little town, where there had never before been a service of the church. There were only two communicants in the village, a man and his wife. Services were held in a hired hall, and there were about four hundred people present. The man assisted the bishop in rendering the service, and the congregation sat in interested silence through the whole of it. The next day, when one of those who had been present was asked her opinion of the service, She replied with feminine exaggeration, "'Oh, they were perfectly grand, and I think that duet between the bishop and Mr.
S. was just lovely.' We used to say that the bishop had turned ritualistic, because it was evident from this that he had been intoning the service. We depended upon him for everything, and we never asked help of him in vain. His own salary, his private fortune, his personal credit, were always at the service of his diocese, his clergy, and his people. He had many strange requests made of him. What do you think of this? He said one day, smiling, and looking up from a letter he had been reading. Here's a missionary wants a set of false teeth. He got them, too. The bishop paid for them. Indeed, there was no other way. Things were so depressed that year that the bishop not only had to get bread and butter for his clergy, but he had to provide some of them with teeth to enable them to eat it.
The little giant is dead now, broken down. All that I ever did in the way of work, or suffered in the way of hardships, if they could be called so, he did over and over again, and suffered much more, and he was an old man twice my age, and not naturally physically strong as I was. In addition to the mere physical labor which he shared in common with his clergy, he had upon his shoulders things which no one could relieve him of. Responsibilities, anxieties, financial demands, the care of all the churches, appalling burdens. Full of years, developing in power, ability, and experience, in the most extraordinary progression, with every added hour of his life, with infinite possibilities of future usefulness before him, he had to break down under the pressure.
Western dioceses are bishop killers at best. No, that is unjust. It is the church herself which kills her bishops. She puts them in positions where their faculties are taxed to the utmost naturally. She gives them rank, position, a bare living, and then she loads upon their shoulders, if they be men, as they always are, who see the opportunities, accept the responsibilities, and endeavor to fulfill the obligations of their position, burdens too heavy for any mortal man to bear. She provides them with little money, a mere pittance in comparison with their needs, gives them a few men, not always those best suited to effectually advance the work, and expects them to go forward. There was a certain missionary jurisdiction vacant not long since.
The former bishop had raised from ten to thirty thousand dollars every year among his eastern friends to carry on that work. He could do this because he made friends by his winning, charming personality, his eloquence, his ready wit, the stories he had to tell, the experiences he had undergone. The money was well spent. It sustained hundreds of church works of different sorts, many of them just beginning. The man who was selected to take up that work would have to face the absolute necessity of continuing to get approximately that amount, or allowing the work already begun to stop. That is a fearful obligation to set before a new and untried man, and the alternative is crushing. If those western bishops are not walking in apostolic footsteps, I know of no men who do so walk.
It is the most exhausting, wearying, heart-breaking lot that can fall to any mortal man to be a Western missionary bishop, and most of them fight it out until they die. The people are helpful, grateful, appreciative. They do what they can. Let none blame them. The story of the struggle of the church in the West is the story of a great tragedy on the part of clergy and people. But it is through successive tragedies that men do arrive and attain after all. The hem of the garment of progress is dabbled with the blood of men who have made way for her by the giving up of the treasure of their hearts to facilitate her advance. In that deluge of men, which has rolled ever westward over the prairies, crept up the long slopes of the rocky mountains, finally beating over them in mighty waves to fall in thunderous surges of inundation on the other side, those who have led the way on the crest of the waves have been beaten into human spray, and having so smoothed the path, are cast aside.
The footprints of civilization are those made by the feet of the men who stand beautiful upon the wild prairies and high mountain tops of the west, and bring good tidings that publish peace, that cry unto Zion, Thy God reigneth. It is happiness to me that during the youngest, freshest, strongest, and most enthusiastic portion of my life, I was associated with them, bishops, priests, and people. There are men like Rowe of Alaska, Kendrick of Arizona, Whitaker of Nevada, Leonard of Western Colorado, Tuttle of Salt Lake, Hare of Dakota, Brewer of Montana, Graves of the Platte, Talbot of Wyoming, Spalding of Colorado, Worthington of Nebraska, Brook of the Indian Territory, Whipple, Gilbert, Gillifam of Minnesota and Millspa, and the noble Thomas of Kansas, who have fought and struggled and passed through as great adventures as the paladins of old.
I do not presume for a moment to place myself even in juxtaposition with such as they. They had, or have, stories to tell which would stir the blood if they could only be induced to proclaim them. These little sketches have only this value. They may perhaps fairly represent what the average missionary undergoes, and must expect in that great empire of the West, in which some day will lie the balance of power of the great republic. I, though born in the East, and living there now, Say, God-speed the day.
End of chapter 11. And of Recollections of a Missionary in the Great West by Cyrus Townsend Brady.