Chapter XL (10)

Even down to so technical a consideration as the language of hoods, the undergraduates manifested fully as much interest as they had been wont to give to baseball batters’ averages. Garvin’s paper came out with a color list by which the college presidents, university chancellors, international statesmen, state officials, seminary heads and the host of lesser academics could be fully interpreted through the colors on the gowns they would wear in the procession: white signifying arts and letters, scarlet theology, purple for philosophy, blue for science, brown for music and so on through the list, which Garvin editorially advised each student to either cut out and have in his hand when the procession moved, or, better still, to carefully memorize it.

The dignity of the impending, classic, stately event; the sorting of gowns, the whispers and queries concerning what world-famous shoulders were to receive the highest degrees: all this sobered the students and stimulated imaginations, days before the actual event transpired. To me it promised to be the opportunity to see, face to face, the men of culture and administrative power whose names were familiar in the far corners of the country: men who not only figured as authors, administrators, lecturers, scientists, travelers, and moral leaders, but, among them, potential Presidents of the nation, honored citizens of public reputation, men whose names were already merged with civic movements, patriotic events, and national political advances. It meant that history, successful ambition, leadership, and moral fibre were to be personified for me in their highest types.

The morning of the inauguration brought with it a great excitement. The Seniors were to wear gowns that morning for the first time. On leaving the house, after breakfast, and taking my position near the Senior Fence, to wait for the formation of the line, a sunburst of silken scarlet gown dazzled my eyes, as a sedate man of sixty, with a white beard, hurried along the path, his head topped by a black velvet bonnet. He was followed by others, in the silken glares of Oxford and Cambridge, and a continual procession of black-draped figures whose multi-colored hoods were like lurid gashes cut in the mourning by a deftly wielded blade.

By nine o’clock the campus was astir with visitors, faculty, alumni, undergraduates, the band and the sight-seers. Ellis marshalled us into a double line, so that to the beholder, in our black gowns and black caps, we resembled a very mournful, if dignified, procession of upright ravens.

Then the band blared forth a martial thunderclap which pulled our feet into time. Slowly, led by the musicians, we filed on our way around the outer edge of the campus, dragging after us the faculty and distinguished visitors whose chief distinction in the procession lay in their inability or unwillingness to keep to the step we fixed. Our two hundred and odd pairs of hands swished against the sides of our flapping gowns in rhythmic evenness. Not even the precision of a Black Watch drill could have been finer rendered than was our Senior march. The heads and bodies swept from side to side like the orderly attack of a straight, long wave beating backwards and forwards against a cliff. Then, at Assembly Hall, our double line divided and we stood with heads uncovered: a lane of honor, while the recipients of honors, the visiting presidents, the faculty and the alumni threaded their way between our lines into the hall.

Deeper and deeper into formalism we plunged: all the traditions of scholarship were called up: all the esthetic possibilities of academic show and etiquette passed in review before us, cap tipping, hood placing, and the summing up of the achievements of a lifetime in two sentences as an honorary degree was bestowed. The trappings and medievalism of scholarship added a new dignity to the college atmosphere. The very air we breathed was musty with the scholar’s tradition.

The only modernness in the event came in the moments of hand-clapping, as addresses, investiture and degrees followed one another. The undergraduate chorus, massed in the rear of the enormous carpeted platform, added to the impressive solemnity of the exercises by its sonorous harmonies. Then came the event of the occasion, and Ellis, knight of valor and skill on the football field, was the central figure in the event. He had been assigned the address representing the undergraduates. He stalked his way to the platform and stood before us, backed by the massed greatness of America’s university world. But he paid no heed to that, as he had not been wont to pay much heed to the thousands of on-lookers who admired his skill in the games. He took fire, and was the first to disturb the quiet soberness of the program by putting vivid gesture and loud, vibrant voice into play. The effect on the visitors and the undergraduates was electrical. Each one bent forward as, in no stately rhetoric or formal phrase, Ellis opened his heart which, at the moment, comprehended the loyalty of all the student body. As he concluded, the students stood in a mass, and after the prolonged applause--the finest applause of the event--our cheer-leader dragged a husky, but thrilling college cheer from our throats, while Ellis modestly found his place in our midst. As we filed out into the light of the noon sun, and could easily discover the towering, broad shoulders of Ellis, our leader, at the head of the line, I thought of the honor he had brought to the college in his four years’ presence in it, and saw in him the union of all that is best in American college life and those qualities which the college aims to invest in every willing student’s life: loyalty to one’s fellows, physical fitness, moral alertness, humility in success, and a respect for the law that governs men and nations.

_Chapter XXXIX. The Lost Parrot. Academic Burlesque. The Nervousness of the Final Minute. A Religious Outcropping in a Non-Pious Heart_

Since the establishment of my family in the college precincts, I had seen very little, in a social way, of my old friend Sanderson. I determined to pay him a visit one evening, and took with me a glass of grape jelly and some hermit cookies, as a remembrance from my wife.

I found him before a heap of blue papers on which were lead pencil scribbles. A look of anxiety was on his face. When he saw me, however, he smiled his pleasure, went over to the hat rack and put on his fez.

“How are you getting along, Sanderson?” I asked.

“Say,” he pleaded, “you couldn’t just run over these reports of mine on your typewriter, could you, Priddy. I’m back about a dozen, and must have them in to get passing marks. It would be such a help!”

“Unfortunately, what with sermons, two prize essays on which I am working, and my own studies, Sanderson, I haven’t a spare minute!”

“Then I’ll have to root out some freshman and give him the job, though a freshman’s so uninformed! Why, I asked one of ’em to just scribble a two-page description of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and it took the idiot most a week to do it, and I don’t think it can be hard reading, from what the Prof. said about it. Now if I’d had time, I could have read it in a night!”

“Same old Sanderson,” I muttered. “I don’t know how you’d get through without help!”

“Well,” he retorted, “since you brought your wife and boy to town, you’ve done mighty little for me, eh?”

“Oh, you’ll take care of yourself,” I replied.

“Well,” he winked, “I have been lucky, lately. Jimmy’s stuck by me!”

“Who’s your latest benefactor, ‘Jimmy?’” I enquired.

“He’s a medic. who rooms across the campus. The nicest man you ever met: patient--oh, so patient, and motherly--oh, so motherly!”

“Motherly?”

“Yes, can sew patches on, and buttons, like a real endowed maiden aunt, and when I’m out of sorts he reads to me, and when I prick my thumb he brings over a medicine case and drops peroxide on. I sprained my wrist at hand-ball, and Jimmy soaked and painted it with stuff, and made a firm leather brace for it. Oh, you wait till he blows in on the medical profession, he’ll fit in it as no man, before him, ever fitted in it. He looks after me like a regular private physician, if I’ll only let him come in and study with me. You see, his own room’s always so full that he wants to get away.”

Sanderson smiled significantly at me.

“Filled with a lot more soft-soapers like you, eh?” I laughed.

“Well, willing good-nature like Jimmy’s is liable to be imposed on,” he agreed. “He comes to my room for protection. I tell you, my lessons have picked up wonderfully since he came.”

“Will he be in tonight?” I asked.

“He sure will!” said Sanderson. “If he doesn’t I don’t know how I’ll get along with my biology quiz in the morning. I was saving it for him!”

“You fraud! He has his own work to do!”

“Don’t scold, please,” replied Sanderson. “He gets through his work all right. He’d starve if he couldn’t be a benefactor to somebody. He will come in tonight. We’ll have a few minutes’ chat. Then he’ll ask me about the quiz and he’ll let go at me for an hour or so. Then we’ll have another chat and it will be my bedtime, for I never plan to be out of bed after half-past ten except on exceptional occasions. I’ll leave my bedroom door open while I get ready. Jimmy’ll talk to me until I let out a snore,--I’ll tell him to be sure and snap the lock after he leaves. Perhaps an hour later he’ll creep out, and go to his own room. Oh, I swear by Jimmy!”

“And get your marks by him, too, eh?”

“What’s a fellow to do?” asked Sanderson.

As I turned to go, Sanderson yawned,

“Say, Priddy, could you run in with that print on Holbein’s ‘Saint Barbara?’ I failed to get it, and we have to recite on it, in the morning. You might bring me the dope on it, too!”

I entered at last upon the final stretch towards my degree. In the stress of work and the excitement of writing a philosophical and a literary essay, in competition for two senior prizes, the days of winter changed into the brighter aspects of spring almost before I was aware of it. Once more we assembled on the campus for the class “sing,” and this time my wife could enjoy the music with me, as we stood on the corner and let our year-old boy ask, “What?” when the cheers began.

The class elections were held, the photograph of the class was taken, backgrounded against a most rustic wall of stone and arrangement of wild shrubbery. Our caps and gowns soon followed the class pictures, and then we wore them to chapel, in which we marched so slowly and solemnly under the guide of our marshal, that more than one irrepressible spirit in the ranks would burst out with laughter at so much dignity in so youthful a crowd. Through these days I often grew impatient. I was eager, now, with restored health, and with a richer mine of truth, to be in a parish again, doing my chosen work.

But when commencement week arrived with its sentimental spirit,--then I felt the full significance of this last educational experience.

A band, brought from the city, gave concerts on the college club porch, amid a forest of plants and shrubs, and under fairylike illuminations. Class reunions brought crowds of graduates, who donned yellow hats, wore clownish clothes, and paraded up and down seeing how much burlesque they could express. One class engaged an Italian hand-organ artist who had also, perched on his music-box, an intelligent parrot which would pick out fortune slips from a box--for five cents. In some way the class lost the parrot, and I came across the Italian boy, crying bitterly, as he searched a wild gully for the bird, saying, when I asked him what the trouble could be,

“Ah, my parrote, he los’, my God, what I do for live now!”

Meanwhile the renters of the organ sat in an automobile and raced back and forth down the main street while it scattered its wheezy music along the trail of gasolene fumes.

On one corner, a group of distinguished-looking men and women stood in the dry gutter, with slips of paper in their hands, singing with more or less effect, and great seriousness,

“Oh, the class of ’Eighty odd,
It is a glorious band,
It scatters wisdom, grace and power,
Throughout this mighty land!”

Over on the opposite side of the campus a crowd of lawyers, bankers, ministers, and business men, who would shock their neighbors at home if they had a shoe-lace untied, paraded in purple wrappers and sun-bonnets topped with paper roses.

Then the morning of graduation arrived. The mock wrappings were put aside by the visitors, who appeared in frock coats and sedate manners. By nine o’clock I joined my classmates at the fence and found my place in the line. Meanwhile crowds of people in holiday dress thronged the campus once again, members of the faculty with gowns fluttering in the wind, and with scarlet, purple, yellow, and white hoods, gathered at the administration building.

As at the Inauguration the band once more took its place at our head, struck up its vibrant tune, and then at the dropping of the marshal’s baton we took the step and marched around the campus, a black, rhythmical procession of academics. The gay-hooded, but sedate faculty followed, to march through the double line of honor we formed at the entrance to the hall. Then we entered and stood at our seats until the marshal’s baton gave us the signal to be seated.

The deep platform before us was ranged with the faculty, the trustees, the recipients of honorary degrees, and the musicians, including a robed choir of students and the musical director.

But my eyes fell on the table at the head of the centre aisle on which lay a thick, flat heap of sheepskins; mine among them.

Nervously I picked up the program, and, as I looked it through, to see the catalogue of my academic career, it told to all who searched it through that Albert Priddy graduated cum laude, and that he had won four first prizes: two in his junior year and two in his senior year: two essays, a story, and a research in philosophy.

The addresses, the salutatory, valedictory, and the greeting by the faculty were given. The choir sang an impressive anthem. The honorary degrees were conferred with great solemnity. The classmate next to me said:

“Priddy, my heart is beating so fast that if we don’t get our degrees soon, it will burst. Just think if anything should prevent our getting them--now!”

“Don’t mention it,” I suggested, in nervous agitation, “please.”

Finally, however, the dean came down from the platform and we stood. Then we began a very slow walk around the side aisles, down past the platform to pass before the dean and receive our degrees. Slowly, ever too slowly, I drew near, and then, a whispered “Priddy” from the Dean and the sheepskin was in my hand.

Immediately I changed the position of the tassel of my cap for I had, that moment, officially shifted myself from the undergraduate rôle of the college and entered the long, historic ranks of the alumni.

When I got back to my seat, my neighbor, who had expressed the fear that something would occur, whispered with relief:

“I’m not a religious fellow, Priddy, but I do feel like singing the doxology, now that I’ve got this!” He pointed to his diploma.

_Chapter XL. In which the Account Comes to a Conclusion in the Life of a Relative. Martin Quotes Spanish and Has the Last Word._

After we had been established in a parish for some time, I suggested to my wife that probably the best Christmas present I could give my Uncle Stanwood and Aunt Millie would be to make them a personal visit after all my years of absence and recite to them all the facts of my education, my marriage, and describe to them the two interesting members of my family.

So I arrived at Uncle Stanwood’s house the week before Christmas with the intention of spending a week with him. I had been asked to preach the Christmas sermon by Mr. Woodward, the minister, who had started me off to the seminary.

My uncle was still living in a mill tenement. “So you’ve got an education after all!” he commented, putting a loving hand on my shoulder. “Education has made a difference in you altogether. You are much different. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

As for my Aunt Millie, she said, “What did you marry an American for? Can she cook?”

Just then the door opened and in slouched the tallest man I ever saw; slouched past us without a word and threw himself moodily into a chair at the end of the supper table. His face had been carved--roughly carved--out of mahogany; it was gaunt, sun-beaten and lined with fret marks. He laid big, scarred hands on his plate. His shoulders drooped and yet were massive in strength. His eyes were like distant lights well back under the shadow of his bulging brows. A look of disgust seemed to have lingered on his thin, curled lips since his birth.

He was my cousin Martin who had arrived from England two years before.

When he rose up to reach out one of his great hands to me, there was a curious, unaccountable antagonism in his tone when he said, “Oh, this’s him, eh? He’s the lucky dog, is he?”

During the recital of my educational experiences which followed, I noticed that my most interested listener was Martin. When I came to those parts which had to do with self-support, he was alert in every muscle. His eyes blazed at me, devouring every word that I said.

When aunt and uncle left us alone, Martin said: “Priddy, do you think the world’s treated me--oh, right, just right?”

“What do you mean, Martin?” I asked. “You’ve got fight in your tone. What’s wrong?”

“Did you never ask that, too?” he retorted, hotly. “Did you ever kick against the goad? I think you did, once. Don’t forget it, Priddy, ever! You’re not the only chap that ever wanted to get ahead, don’t lose sight of that. If it comes to matching ambition, I’ve got enough and to spare. Here you are, not much over twenty, I take it, yet you’ve got polished by seven years of schooling. Seven years of it! Have you any more right to it than me? Here I am nearly thirty and what am I? Blest if I’m anything but a hod carrier! What have I ever been, Priddy? Did I ever have a chance? I went into the mill at eight and have been there till this winter set in. God knows it’s little I know in the way of schooling! I can write my name and read some; but I got it myself. You know what the mill can be to an ambitious chap. You never felt it pressing down and stifling you more than I did. I tell you that.” He actually spit on his hands and rubbed them, as if on the verge of striking me.

“The beginning of this winter I said I wouldn’t stand it no longer, and I won’t! No mill will get me again; not if I have to starve. I nearly have starved, this winter, trying to keep out. I’ve peddled shoes, run a baker’s cart, been janitor of a club-room and now I’m carrying bricks! Maybe you don’t think it’s hard! I wish you had it to go through. Perhaps you have, only your hands arn’t spoiled like mine with the frost. Even my feet are lame, this very minute, through frost. I’m earning a dollar seventy-five a day: good pay, but I shouldn’t last more than a few years at it and then----. Besides, I want to get married. She’s waiting. I’ve just got fifty dollars in the bank. Do you wonder I feel so?”

On Christmas Sunday a blackboard in front of the church announced that the “Rev. Albert Priddy, formerly of this church, will preach in the morning and evening. Everybody Welcome!”

My uncle took me aside, in the morning, and said:

“I’m coming out to hear you, Al. Do your best, lad. I’ll be with you. God knows I don’t deserve all this!”

It was a very simply arranged church; plain, white-washed walls, and a cheaply carpeted platform. While the first hymn was being sung, my Uncle Stanwood crept into a rear pew and kept his eyes down.

But while I preached, a half smile of pride stole into his face and to my excited imagination his head seemed to be nodding approval to all I said. The look in his eyes seemed to be saying, “Show them, Al!”

I whispered to the minister, “Let me pronounce the benediction and while we are singing the last hymn, get down the aisle and meet my uncle. He may get out before you. He’s timid.”

But Uncle Stanwood crept out before the benediction and I did not see him again until my arrival home for dinner.

On arriving home, I was startled by what Aunt Millie did. She came up to me, patted me lovingly on the head and said, “I’m glad you did so well, Al. Your uncle’s been telling me all about it. I’ll go and hear you tonight, too.”

Martin evidently was interested, for in that belligerent tone of his, though softened by a light laugh, he said:

“I suppose I’ll have to go, too, seeing I’m his relation!”

I left the house that evening somewhat early, because I had to meet some friends. Martin was blacking his shoes; Aunt Millie was troubling herself unduly over what she should wear: a superfluous question, as she had but one Sunday dress and hat.

On my way to church that night, I could not help feeling that I must have misunderstood my aunt. I chided myself for not having read her aright. I began to realize that there was a deep under-current to her nature--perhaps one of love?

It was a thought like that that proved my best girding for the evening sermon. I sat in the pulpit while the church filled; for this evening service was always well attended. The choir of mill boys and girls, led by a patriarchal man whose face and hands were white as fuller’s earth, sang stirring anthems in which we saw the Palestinian shepherds in mute adoration of the stable miracle. The congregation sang, with great unction, another Christmas theme. Martin’s head towered at the rear; but I could find no trace of Aunt Millie.

After the service, and the greetings of old-time friends, I looked about for Martin and Aunt Millie. I saw neither. It was somewhat late when I arrived home. Aunt Millie was waiting for me with a troubled face.

“You managed to hide yourself pretty well!” I laughed.

She cried as she confessed:

“I didn’t go, Al. I didn’t hear you at all. That’s the plain truth!”

“Why, I thought I saw you getting ready when I left,” I said.

“Yes, I was; but I didn’t hear you preach. I couldn’t!”

“Oh,” I laughed, “you couldn’t? What was the matter?”

“I started out; but on the way I lost heart. I was afraid that I might cry out in church, with you preaching, lad. Besides, I’m not a dissenter. I was passing the Episcopal church and went in there, instead. I felt more at home. You can understand, can’t you, lad?”

Then she asked me to sit on the sofa and tell her everything I had spoken of in my sermon; not to miss a point, but to give it all. She gave my points commendation, remarking every now and then while her eyes brimmed with tears, “It must have done them good, that!”

Uncle sat at the lower end of the room, saying not a word; but listening, carefully. In the midst of my report the front door opened, and Martin, taking long, determined strides, hurried through the room without looking at any of us, closed the kitchen door with a bang, and left us looking into each other’s faces in bewilderment.

“Maybe he’s mad at something you said, Al. You didn’t chance to look his way and talk of ‘coming to God,’ did you?”

I solemnly averred that I had not been so evangelical as that. My aunt hurried into the kitchen where she lingered for a few moments. On her return she said:

“It’s all right, Al. There’s nothing wrong. He’s just impressed by hearing you preach, that’s all. He said to me, ‘If education can do that, for a fellow, I want some of it!’”

The next morning a heavy snow was falling. Martin would have no work. After breakfast he asked me if I would go into the parlor and have a talk, he wanted to ask me something. I readily agreed.

The former antagonism had gone from his voice as he began to speak. His words came quietly, curiously, like a child’s.

“Priddy, what can a chap learn to be in college?”

“What do you mean? What does a college fit men for?” I asked.

Martin nodded soberly, his eyes fixed on mine.

I laughed, “Oh, college will train you for almost any profession; that is, the professional schools will. You can study to be a doctor, a lawyer, a forester, a teacher--oh, anything you think of!”

“What do you think’s the best kind of a thing for a chap to be?”

“Why,” I replied, in embarrassment, “that depends upon the fellow, you know.”

“Well,” said Martin, “what kind of a profession would you advise a chap like me to take, for instance?”

I smiled, knowing what all this fencing meant. “Forestry is a good profession, just now,” I advised. “It’s a new branch to the government and brings in good money. I am sure you would like to be a forester.”

“What’s his work, especially?” came the question.

I explained, as best I knew, the different functions of a trained forester, emphasizing, “Mind you, Martin, he’s paid for what he knows and not what he does with his hands. He doesn’t have to chop down trees and all that sort of stuff; but he knows all about saving the forests, improving them, doctoring them.”

“How long does it take a man to learn that trade?” was the next question.

“About seven years, including college and professional school.”

“It would take a fellow like me that long?”

“Oh,” I admitted, reluctantly, for I felt that this would put a stop to any ambition that he had, “of course you are not ready for college. That would mean at least three years more!”

Martin mused,

“Seven and three--ten. I’m twenty-eight years old. That would bring it up to thirty-eight.”

“Yes,” I assented, “but you must remember that there are a good many working years left, after that!”

“I’m not thinking about myself; it’s Nora. We planned to get married by spring. Of course I should put it off. I wonder if you’d help me?”

“Help you--how--what?”

“Help me to explain to Nora; so she’ll wait--wait probably that long!”

“You can count on me to help you in anything, Martin.”

“When she knows it’s for her betterment, maybe she’ll be willing,” interjected Martin, as if in argument with himself.

I nodded, vigorously.

“Anyway,” he said with that belligerent tone of his, “she’ll have to be!”

Under the inspiration of this conversation, I pulled Martin out of the house and took him to the public library, where we asked for a bundle of preparatory school and college catalogues. These we whispered over and patiently studied until noon. We found that, by unusual labor, it would be possible for Martin to get his preparation, his college degree, and his professional training within nine years! As a further proof of our optimism, we decided that Martin should enter Yale when he was fitted!

We found from the catalogue of the preparatory school that Martin had decided upon, that the term opened within two days. When I advised Martin to write a letter to the principal and await a reply, he stormed at me:

“And probably it would be a week before I heard from him. That would put me behind the classes--and you would be gone, too. If they aren’t overcrowded, why, I’ll not wait to write; but just take my fifty dollars and go. They can only say no.”

His decision made, Martin began to show me what a decided nature he possessed. He drew the fifty dollars out of the bank. He bought some necessary clothes out of the money. The next day he gave notice to the contractor that he would carry bricks no more. Then he outlined his scheme to uncle and aunt.

My Aunt Millie stormed.

“This education business is getting on my nerves. First it’s one and then another of you.” Turning on me she said, “Nice way of treating us: coming to take a good paying boarder from us--and we need the money so, too!”

But Martin interjected, “Look here, I did it all myself. Blame me for it!”

But my aunt would not be consoled. “And I’d been planning so for the wedding, too!” she exclaimed.

As I chanced to be going on a trip to the Seminary at the time, I told Martin that I could be his companion as far as he had to go.

“But you’ve got to go to the North End with me and help me explain matters to Nora. You’ve got a smoother tongue than I have and she’ll listen to you.”

So Martin and I started out on our dismal mission. Nora lived on the top floor in one of the tenements. She was a stout, fair-faced woman of twenty-seven with a way of casting her head sidewise when she spoke to me, as if she had trouble with her sight. She stood gazing at us, at that unexpected hour, from behind the ironing-board. The odor of burning cloth reached my nostrils, as she stood wondering. She had burnt the shirtwaist and no amount of frantic rubbing with soap could take the scar out.

She dismissed us to the parlor while she put on a more presentable dress. Martin said not a word to me; but he pointed dumbly to his photograph in a place of honor on the mantel.

Nora came into the room exclaiming:

“Why, Martin, didn’t you let me know? What’s the matter?”

Martin started to speak; but could not. He nodded to me.

Carefully, painfully, hesitantly, I outlined Martin’s ambition to Nora. More than that I explained the reasonableness of it, the prime importance of it to their later fortunes. I tried to paint in glowing terms the high station to which Nora, through Martin, might be exalted. I leaped from point to point with enthusiastic eloquence, when the theme had mastered me. But when I had concluded, and was looking eagerly into the young woman’s face for a favorable sign, she gasped, then in a cold voice she said:

“Oh, yes, it’s all right for _him_; but don’t I know that if he goes to college he’ll meet other girls, better looking, better dressed, better educated than I am, or can ever hope to be. Suppose I don’t break off this engagement now, how am I to know that he’ll not forget me, throw me over. Have you thought of that in all your plans?”

“Martin’s a man of his word, I suppose,” I protested.

“You’d find me true, Nora,” declared Martin.

“How long do you want me to wait?” demanded the girl.

“Only about seven or eight years or so!” haltingly explained Martin.

Nora leaped to her feet and stamped the floor, angrily, imperatively.

“You’d keep me waiting seven or eight years; waiting that long for you, with all the risk! Not me! _Not for a thousand Martins!_”

That was her answer. We left her without more words. We left her watching us, crying. Martin commented, when we were outside:

“Now, if she’d only had more faith in me and made me feel certain of victory, maybe I’d given the whole thing up; but now--we’ll go tomorrow, sure!”

The following evening we sat in the North Station in Boston, awaiting the train that would carry us on an all-night journey. Every nerve Martin possessed quivered with pessimism. He scolded, chided, lodged complaints at everything and everybody. He tried to give me the impression that I had made a prisoner of him; that he no longer had any initiative of his own. As we sat in the waiting room he held humorous monologues the purport of each one being, “What a fool I am, at my age, to be running out among a lot of kids to get ready for college. What a fool!” During that hour’s wait, he had resolved four times to expend that fifty dollars in a ticket to the orange groves of California. Finally, when he had been brooding in silence for some moments, with a quick action he pulled out his pocket book, handed it to me and said, savagely, “Here, take this and keep it safe. No matter how I beg or what I say, don’t let me have it. To make things sure, you’d better run and get me my ticket to the school; then I’ll be sure and not turn back!”

As our train started from the station it plunged into a heavy, blinding snow-storm that had been raging throughout the entire day. Once in our seats, Martin recommenced his tirades against this “foolishness.” But there were propitious signs near at hand, for his encouragement. A man was coming down the aisle looking for a seat in whom I recognized a Seminary comrade of mine. He was a stubby fellow of middle age, with an ill-kept, drooping moustache.

“Say, Harlan, old fellow,” I greeted, “stop right here and meet my cousin.” When he was seated, I talked with him, and, for Martin’s benefit, to whom I slyly winked as I talked, brought out the fact that Harlan had been much older than my cousin when he had started out for an education. Nay, he had been handicapped with a wife and a child! Now he enjoyed the dignity of the ministerial profession. The moral was evident to Martin. He braced up and became very agreeable, especially to my old friend Harlan.

We talked in low tones until three o’clock in the morning, at which time the brakeman called out the station where I should leave Martin to his fortunes. The poor fellow seemed on the verge of tears as he gripped his suit-case and followed me to the door as the train slacked up its speed. I looked off from the platform. The storm had not abated. I could see only a great snowdrift where the station platform should have been. A street light flickered weakly out on the street.

As Martin dropped up to his knees in the snowdrift and reached for his suit-case I whispered:

“Find a hotel, and let me hear from you, old fellow. Keep up your courage. If there’s anything I can do, call on me!” Harlan waved his hand and called, “Never too late to mend!” an aphorism which might have been pertinent to the occasion, and then the brakeman’s lantern swung. As the train lumbered through the drifts, I saw Martin bend his head to the storm, lift his suit-case above the drifts, and go plodding towards the street light. The station was deserted, and I hoped that my cousin would find some one to direct him before the storm discouraged him.

A few months later, I stopped off at the town where I had left my cousin. He met me at the train, the same serious man I had left, though with a trace of a smile on his face and more of content in his speech than before. He guided me past a grocery store and said:

“I get up at four in the morning, do my studying, then before classes I go out and take orders for that firm.”

He led me down a placid street, through the shovelled paths of snow, and after opening the front door led me into a well-warmed and very nicely furnished chamber.

“I do their chores and earn the rent for this room,” he announced, with a grim smile. “Furnace to look after, paths to shovel, and baby to keep happy, if it wakens when they want to go to an entertainment.”

At supper time he led me into the heart of the town into an eating-house. He had a meal ticket punched by the waitress.

“This ticket costs three dollars,” he said, “enough to last a week at three meals a day. I make it last three weeks by scrimping and having a bottle of milk a day in my room.”

“How do you like the school?” I asked, pleased with these evidences of his thrift.

“Well,” he mused, “they are a lot of kids, to be sure, and I’m quite a freak among them. ‘Grandad’ Martin they call me. I suppose they’ve never had so old a man in their classes before. Anyhow, that’s the way you would argue from their looks and talk. But it doesn’t bother me--much. I guess we’ll all get used to it, by and by.”

“How is Nora getting along?” I ventured to enquire.

“Married!” he snarled, and talked no more about that.

“What do you think about this opportunity, Martin?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for fifty weddings!” he declared.

Throughout the year I received word from him, couched in various tempers of letters. Sometimes he was about to throw the whole ambition over, because as he wrote, his mind was not as fresh as it might be. Then he would write that the boys wanted him to become a member of the basket-ball team, but he had refused, because, he argued, so old a man, and so tall a one, would not do in playing against sixteen and eighteen-year-olds! In spring, he had trouble with his French. Then a complication of physical troubles cropped out, as if to test his patience. Finally, after being confined to his bed by illness, and having had to forego the final examinations, he decided that he was too old to keep at it, and that he had too many handicaps. He went to the West, thus keeping to his old intention, and after he had secured the position as “boss” of a large gang of men, on construction work, a “shirt-sleeved, and white collar job” as he termed it, he wrote to me the following letter.

“MY DEAR COUSIN:

“Don’t feel at all that you did me a bad turn by having me go to that
school for a year. It was the most profitable investment I have ever
made! I find that out more and more each day. It has released me,
perhaps forever, from that miserable hand drudgery I always hated,
for in that single year’s contact with polite speech, with teachers,
and with the finer opportunities of life, I was given more confidence
in myself and my opportunities. I am not afraid to approach educated
people any more. I hold my head up higher; I feel myself more of a
_man_. I can even write at the end of my letter, something impossible
before, ‘_Remunda de pasturaje hace becerros gordos_,’ which is a
Spanish proverb out here for, ‘Change of pasture makes fat calves!’
God bless our schools!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.