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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He counted into my hand fifty dollars and said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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