The floor was ready to bend under the weight of the crowd that stood waiting behind the chairs for Brock’s signal to sit. Like a stern, powerful, determining Ruler, the head waiter stood at the opposite end of the room, with his eye on his watch, not willing to press his thumb on the Sunday-School bell until the instant seven o’clock arrived. Eyes looked longingly on the hot, fried potatoes. It was no use. Seven o’clock was a minute off. Some rumbled the legs of the chairs. To no purpose. The German had patience. Finally the snap of the bell sent every man and woman to the table accompanied by the roar of scraping chairs, thumping feet, and expressions of satisfaction.
Near the head of my first table sat a very young, pink-cheeked Southern girl possessed of charming, gracious ways. Her “Mr. Priddy, please, a spoon,” was as musical as ever a request could be. It made me feel sorry that the spoon was not gold instead of German metal. Consequently, when she asked me for a third glass of water during the first five minutes of breakfast, it was no small happiness for me to secure it, as speedily as possible, for her. But on my return with the third glass her neighbor asked for one. On my return with that, the Southern girl had her glass emptied. So it went for ten minutes: each one of them drinking amounts of water sufficient for ducks or geese to swim in—it seemed to me. Finally, on picking up a fork some one had let fall on the floor, I saw several glasses, full to the brim with water, under the Southern girl’s chair. She had been initiating me. With a broad wink at the others, I very slyly sprinkled some pepper on the glass of water before her when her head was turned and then waited for results. They soon came. She reached for her glass, took a sip, and then commenced to choke.
“What is the matter, miss?” I asked, “will you have some more water?”
She looked at me in resentful astonishment, at first, and then seeing that the others at the table were laughing, she joined in with them, saying,
“Who peppered the water?”
“Was there pepper in the water?” asked one across the table.
There the matter ended, although, when in a spirit of boastfulness I recounted the experience at the waiter’s table, Brock chided me by saying,
“You will have to be careful. We must have discipline, brother Priddy!”
Thropper was waiting for me, after breakfast, when the call to chapel sounded: the first exercise of the day. We joined the procession of students which moved swiftly towards the central building. Into it the procession hurried, racing against the tolling of the bell. Then followed a tiresome climb up three pairs of stairs to the topmost room of all, used for a chapel. An attic room, square and dimly lighted by dormer windows. The roof girders overhead clung together like knitted arms bent on holding together such a load of humanity as trusted to them. Against the wall, opposite the door, spread a broad platform with a semi-circle of male and female faculty arrayed on it. Before it, and awed into respectful silence by it, spread a fan of students, sitting in chairs, by groups. I sat at the heart of Evangelical University. This chapel, in its plainness, its bareness, its poverty, formed the pivot on which the life of the University swung; for here the religious faith and doctrine which were the most eagerly sought gifts of the place were received. Here, in these simple chairs, was where men and women found God: the highest advertisement of the University.
The doors closed out late-comers. A hymn was sung. This has been said, and echoed many a time: that a hymn was sung. But this first hymn I heard, proceeding from over a hundred hearts, should not be plainly, unemphatically said to have been merely sung. If each word be trebly underscored and trebly emphasized, then, one may say, a hymn was sung that morning, for to me, the first bar of melody seemed to be the onrush of an Angelic symphony through a suddenly opened door of Heaven! Were they common men and women who were singing with such resonant exultation! The boarded ceiling and the huge square attic room throbbed with it. Rapture, adoration, victory, joy unspeakable weighted down each note as the melody unfolded itself. The reliant basses, anchored to the background of the melody—a resonant, manly anchorage—made sudden excursions into the higher realms of the theme, but not to displace the tenors whose shrill praises were the nearest to what a hammer stroke on a bar of silver would produce. The dulcet altos, as rich depths of throat as any one might expect, entwined themselves in and out of the sopranos’ soaring, singing as if to keep those higher voices from too suddenly darting past the doors of Heaven and surprising God. That was no mere singing of a hymn. It was a hymn for the love of the hymn; singing for the pure love of singing. Or, better, a spiritual exercise that could certainly be no more willingly or much better done in a morning rehearsal of the Court melodists!