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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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