Four times a year the minister visited all his country parishioners. It generally took him two or three days to go the rounds in one neighbourhood—a neighbourhood, I may say, extended over several miles. He would leave "town" (there were six hundred inhabitants in the place where he presided over the only steepled meeting-house of his three charges!) early in the morning, and reach the first house where he was to call at about ten o'clock. At noon he would have his dinner with some one of the farmer folk, being careful to select for his noon call a family with whom he had not partaken bread on his previous visit of three or six months back; for to have the parson to dinner or supper or to "put him up for the night" was an honour for which there was great rivalry, and he tried to be impartial in his distribution of such favours. During the meal hours, the minister's horse fared as sumptuously as did his good master. Apples and sugar and turnips and carrots and all the luxuries that the farm produced were given to the animal by the children of the place, while the farmer or his hired help brought out their choicest corn and bran and oats and fragrant hay. Nothing was too good for the minister and his horse. Indeed, even the "buggy" would be washed up and made "fit" during the interval of the meal hour.
Happy was that house and its dwellers with whom the minister elected to call late in the evening. The "spare bedroom," which adjoined the parlour and was only opened and aired on great occasions, was given over to him, and he slept upon the softest feather bed, amid the snowiest linen, and beneath a white-fringed canopy. In the morning the usual six o'clock breakfast would be delayed on his account until 6.30, and an hour later the minister was jogging along in his buggy to the next farmhouse.
I have written this much about the country parson with whom my own childhood was associated, because he was a typical American country parson then, and he is typical now. His round of duties and pleasures during his country visits are identical with that of hundreds of others of our country parsons. The practice of taking charge of a village church and then preaching on Sunday afternoons in the neighbouring country schoolhouses, is followed to a very great extent throughout the United States. The salary received is sometimes more, sometimes less, than what I have mentioned. What these men and their wonderful wives are able to do for themselves and their children on salaries ranging from six hundred to a thousand dollars a year is little less than miraculous. I have spoken of the "wonderful wives" of our country parsons. Here is a description of the wife of the country parson who preached in our school-house. She was not and is not unique. There are very many like her.
When she married the parson, she was a graduate of one of our best "mixed colleges." She took her diploma on the day that the man whom she afterwards married took his. She had taken the course in Greek and Latin, the higher mathematics, French, and German. When I knew her as the parson's wife, she gave lessons in French, music, and painting. The young mother of three children, she not only had no nursemaid to look after them, but she had no servants in her kitchen. She did all the housework, including the family washing and ironing, and the baking of the bread and cakes and pies. She made her children's dresses and her own. The parson's shirt front and his spotless white lawn ties were "laundered" by her. At ten o'clock in the morning she presided over the wash-tub, and at three in the afternoon she read Cicero, perhaps in the same kitchen while waiting for the bread to bake in the oven. She never looked untidy, our parson's wife! Even when hanging over the wash-tub or the bread-tray, she wore a smart-looking stuff dress, kept always clean by the donning of an immense bibbed apron. She had not an "at home" day, nor even an "at home" hour. She was always at home when she was in the house, at whatever hour of the day or night a visitor might knock at her front door. If, while in the kitchen, she heard the knocking that announced callers, the bibbed apron was thrown off, and in less than a minute later she appeared at the door, well-dressed and smiling. She was the confidante of all those in trouble; she gave advice to those married and those about to marry; she was president of the Ladies' Aid Society; she led the sewing circle, she played the church organ every Sunday morning and led the singing of the choir as well; she taught a class in the Sunday-school, and then went home and got dinner in time for her husband to start for his school-house preaching. Sunday night she presided over the young people's prayer meeting which preceded the regular preaching service. Twice a year she gave her own children a "party," to which all the other village children were invited. She formed "Bands of Mercy" in all the country round, and wrote little stories for the children to read at their meetings on the subject of kindness to dumb animals.
OUR PARSON'S WIFE.
Her house was often the scene of weddings, for those young women who could not be married at home (church weddings were a rarity), went to the parsonage to be married. There was always cake in the parsonage, and on these occasions the lady of the house would bring forth a bit of it from the larder for the bride and groom, for whom it served as the "wedding cake."
Country parsons—indeed, I think I may say nearly all American clergymen in both city and country—give the fees they receive at weddings to their wives. It is understood that the wedding fee is the perquisite of the minister's wife. Five dollars (£1) is looked upon by the ordinary country parson as a liberal fee. The very rich village grocer or country farmer occasionally astonishes the officiating clergyman with ten dollars, but such a happening is an event that could not be expected to occur oftener than once in a country parson's lifetime. The young man for whom the parson performs the all-important ceremony usually gives what he thinks he can afford. He may give two dollars. He would scarcely give less than that amount in money.
Then there is "payment in kind." A young couple frequently drive up to the parsonage in a "lumber waggon" filled with potatoes, or turnips, or firewood, or flour, beans, pickled pork—in fact, anything of an edible nature that grows on the farm. I have a schoolgirl friend married to a village clergyman, who recently regaled me with a story of a young countryman, who, with his bride, drove up to the parsonage with a large chicken coop, full of cackling hens, which he proudly delivered over to her husband as his fee for performing the marriage ceremony, with the information that "them was as good layin' hens as ever lived, and calc'lated to pervide eggs for a year an' more!"