“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.
Chapter XXXIV. My Wife
Packs me off to College. The
Senior and I Stop at a Rock
for a Drink, Meet the Advance
Guard of Students, Plunge into a
Bedlam, and Witness the Labors
of the Freshmen. The Finger-study
of Quarles and my Apology Given
to the Retired Medical Man who
was Specializing in Hens
“HERE I am, in our honeymoon year, packing you off to college,” commented my wife, as she folded some towels and handed them to me to put in my trunk. “It takes me back to the day when my mother did it for me.”
“And you’re to have the hard end of the business,” I replied, “staying in this house alone and keeping an eye on the parish. Not much of a honeymoon to that through the long, winter days, while I am in the swirl of college events, with all the fellowship one can desire.”
“But there’ll be holidays and Saturdays at home, for you,” she answered. “I shall see you once a week at least, for you will have to preach here every Sunday. We’re working together, now,” she added, quietly. “If there’s any suffering, any hardship, any self-denial involved, I am willing to undergo it, else I would not have married you!”
In her voice ran an undertone of tragic feeling and for the first time I began dimly to realize, in the midst of my own opportunity for a college education, that in this little home, back over the hills, my wife would be waiting, and waiting, through the long hours of the day and night, for the two years’ study to be at an end: the study which would break up our home and separate us during the first days of our married life. I vowed then to give it all up: to plunge into the pastoral work: to send word to the college dean that he must not expect me.