The parish to which I ministered during my last year in the Seminary, and in which I planned to settle immediately upon graduation, was in a seaport town of a quaint type: buried back in the rugged coast lines of the Atlantic. The Embargo Act had been like the chilling breath of petrification on the East Indiamen, the Ceylon traders, the China brigs, and the many other ships which had gone out from its port. The wharves to which of old time these sea-rovers had been tied when in port had rotted until, in my day, the water-front was outlined by their black, damp, soggy ruins. Here and there, outside the precincts of the town, half buried among young saplings and deep grasses, could be seen the piles and planks of a once stout wharf. In the village itself, almost everything pointed, with an index finger, to the past as the scene of the town’s glory. The hotel in which I stayed, in stage-coach days had been a tavern, and from the porch of it the landlord, wearer of a blue military coat with brass buttons, had fed the wild birds and pigeons. The house had an office-boy who was seventy odd years old, a man whose clothes and speech were tinctured with reminiscences of the sea and the past glory of the village. As one tipped back in one of the hundred-year-old chairs, which were whittled, by loungers’ pocket knives, to skeletons of rungs and seats, one saw slow-pacing oxen, nodding their heads in two-four metronomic time, pulling loads of sun-dried, salted codfish from the outdoor driers to the packing factory. In the parlors, on the hillside, were many interesting relics of the past, left by the race of sea captains and ship-owners almost extinct. There were trinket boxes made from scented, oriental woods, and little Ceylon gods of brass and porcelain. There were Japanese ivories and vases and draperies. There were ebony ornaments from savage islands and carved novelties, the product of barbarous intelligence.
The old families, remaining in the village, were of that splendid Puritan sort who serve God with mind, heart, and purse, and while the older men and women remained at home, the sons and daughters, blessed with their heritage, had gone out into the world to do no small share of the brilliant and serviceable tasks for which honor and wealth are given. When the bells on the two churches rang, on Sunday mornings, one waited for the other, so that they might ring in antiphonal brotherhood, seeming to say, “Good morning,” and to reply, “Good morning,” in praise of the doctrinal harmony in the parishes where, in the by-gone years, opposing pulpits had been girt about with demoniac lightnings and surmounted by the wild-eyed heresies of dethroned angels.
In addition to the salary for my preaching, a white, green-shuttered, iridescent-windowed parsonage, perched on a summit of grass terraces, stood ready, as my home, whenever I should want it; in other words, as members of my parish phrased it, “when I should bring Mrs. Priddy!” Now a twelve-roomed house, rent free, perched on grass terraces, guarded on one side by a syringa and on the other side by some red currant bushes, says nothing to a young bachelor theologue, about to graduate, but, “How about a wife?” As there was no ignoring such a house, there was no ignoring its consequent,—a wife. The two, like a “neither” and “nor,” went together. Probably that is why parishes generally see to it that there is a parsonage, especially where young ministers are concerned: that such a concrete suggestion will work on the mind and heart of their minister, through the night hours with all the terror of an inescapable dream, in the day hours as a thing to be accounted for whether or no. There is, perhaps, no suggestion more haunting can befall a young, bachelor minister, than an unoccupied, Colonial parsonage, standing on a summit of terraces, unoccupied! If he rents it to outside parties, it is one way of saying to your parish, “I am too cowardly to marry!” If he permits it to remain empty, he has to spend many precious hours explaining to the church committee and their wives his good reasons for having it empty, and there are so few good reasons that the task is no desirable one.
However, Destiny, using a strange mouthpiece, showed me a clear path in the matter. It came about in this wise.
The lower floor, in the east wing of Therenton Hall, at the Seminary, was devoted to social purposes. It was the meeting-place of the students immediately after supper, where all sorts of recreations were indulged. A song, a piano solo, a burlesque, or a bit of clever mimicry was usually in order in that place. It was ostensibly a reading-room, where, on the tables, were to be found magazines of interest to theological students.
It was in this room where our freak visitors came to describe to us their specialties: men who came and tried to woo us from study to strange, emotional cults; men who came and told us, to our faces, with prophetic fearlessness of consequences, that by our alignment to the Seminary, and to any institution of learning, we were making ourselves heretics and outcasts. One evening, at the supper table, in Commons, Bobbett announced that “Professor Hoyle, a fellow that feels bumps, a phrenologist, would be in the reading-room, ready to read our capabilities, our faults, and our destinies for twenty-five cents a head, special price to theological students from the usual fifty-cent rate. No satisfaction, no pay!”
Town lassies, in medieval Europe, never flocked to palm-reader or card-turner, with more curiosity or “pooh-poohing,” than did we. On the way through the yard, the same critical faculties which we had brought to bear on “hallucinations” and “superstitions” in our studies of psychology and savage religions were brought to bear upon our impending interview with “Professor Hoyle.” Certainly the majority of us, by the time we had entered the parlor, were there on account of no other emotion than the wish to bring to bear on this man’s acts our trained, critical, scientific acumen; though it cost us twenty-five cents!
The “professor” was waiting for us, a tall, slightly stooped, well-dressed young man. He made no claims, no speech. He merely said,
“Come up, one following another, and after I have examined you and made a note of my findings, I will write out each one’s report on paper and if it does not suit, why none need pay.”
One after another then we filed into the chair and had those pliant, nervous, cold fingers steal, subtly, over our cranial topographies. Silently, quickly, skilfully, bumps that nature had placed on our skulls, and bumps that basket-ball and parallel bars had induced, were sorted out, interpreted, and their meanings put on a pad of paper, against our names. Then, after some moments of scratching, the “professor” handed each one of us his report. Laughingly they were received, laughingly they were perused, and then looks of startled wonder were the rule, for in some unaccountable way, the “professor” had managed to find strange true interpretations of us. He informed one student that if the latter had not planned to become a minister, he would have done well at mechanical engineering, a vocation in which the student had had some proficiency. There were some intimate revelations for each one of us, true appraisals of temperament, inclination, and habit. But it was the unknown things over which we smiled, the mysterious future, which we were ready to believe on account of the truthfulness with which he had told our present. Instantly the parsonage on the summit of grass terraces came into mind, as the last words of my phrenological report read: