THE apocalyptic hope of the students who were domiciled in Therenton Hall, the Seminary dormitory, included steam heat and running water; for neither of those modern conveniences had been installed up to that time and students had to carry hods of coal up four flights of stairs; and were compelled to convey pitchers of water the same distance. Each one had his own coal bin in the vaulted cellar and also owned a kindling pile which he watched with suspicious and amusing jealousy. Besides that, ashes had to be raked from stoves, carried downstairs, and sifted—by the thrifty—in a far corner of the cellar, where lay the dormitory ash heap.
The parlor stoves, coal-hods, water bowls, and pitchers, the personal possessions of the students, were handed down from class to class, in many instances, until the most trivial price—say a dollar for a six-foot stove—gave a profit of ten cents and three years’ use to the senior who sold out. The stove I purchased for two dollars was a giant of a stove, high, bulky, and lavishly decorated with ring-a-rosy cherubs, covered with a thick coating of stove polish until they had ceased being an angelic silver and had become an Ethiopian black. I mention this stove because its sheet-tin girth was hallowed by hoary traditions, and if it could have spoken it would have kept me cheered for many hours by a recital of the different escapades in which it had figured at the hands of the theologues. The rust on its bands, for instance, was due to the fact that some students had plastered it with a swaddling of sticky fly paper. The dent immediately under the hood had been made by a flying theological treatise which had been aimed originally at the head of an intruder, who insisted on keeping one of the stove’s former owners from a study of Hebrew nouns. The broken foot, which rested on some thin wafers of wood, was caused by the attempt on the part of some students to reverse the stove during the absence of another owner who was paying court to one of the young women in the city.
We attended to the dusting and care of our own rooms with more or less thoroughness. Some of my friends chose to sleep and study amidst dust and disorder rather than to endure the strain and toil of a sweeper, a beater, and a duster for a Saturday morning. When we went to a city prayer-meeting or a lecture, we would usually dangle our greasy kerosene cans as far as the corner grocery and leave them to be filled. In fact, so inextricably interwoven with our intellectual concerns were our domestic habits, that I had not been in the dormitory very long before I caught myself entering my Greek class holding fast to a coal-hod, which I had taken the trouble to carry along the walk and into the recitation building, while I had unconsciously propped my Greek Testament very snugly behind the lower banister, under the impression that it had been the coal-hod.
One Saturday morning, Providence or Fate—whatever it would be at a theological seminary—arranged a mise en scène which called attention, in an effective way, to the inconvenience of permitting the students the use of coal-hods and wash bowls. The President was entertaining a gentleman who had been the first donor to our new and splendid gymnasium. He had escorted the benefactor through the bathrooms, the bowling-alleys, over the running-track, and had taken him among the equipment, with evidences of great pleasure. I had occasion to be leaving the gymnasium in their wake. I saw the President throw open the door which led into the lower hall of the dormitory and heard him say, “This is our dormitory—” or something to that effect, and he stepped back to allow the seminary benefactor to precede him into the dignified precincts of our domicile. Then he followed, and one may imagine how he must have felt, as he gazed upon a chaos of coal, of wood, of water, and of broken crockery, which lay like the trail of a sloven over the hall and over the first flight of steps; echoes from the preceding night, when the top floor had engaged the lower floors in a counter demonstration of noise, smash, and confusion.
Chapter XXIII. A Plot Which
had for its End the Raising up of
a Discouraged Young Preacher
ONE day I was sitting in the apparently deserted library, looking over the new books which were always kept on a side shelf, at the entrance to one of the alcoves, when I heard a heavy, most disconsolate sigh, coming from a hidden corner in the rear of the room. The sigh was followed by the rustling of book leaves. I continued my investigation of the new books, but was once more interrupted by that same, prolonged sighing. It was just such a sigh as Dante must have heard proceeding from the lips of those unfortunate creatures who stood in neither hope nor despair. I decided to investigate, and, for that purpose, went down the alcove from which the sighing seemed to have come, and there, with his back turned to me, seated at one of the reference tables, with his head resting woefully on his spread out arms, sat Amos Tucker, an upper-classman.
I hesitated to approach him, at first, and pretended that I had come into the alcove for a book. Then again the sigh proceeded from the limp heap at the table, and, throwing all restraint to the winds, I went to the table, touched Amos on the shoulder, and said,
“Are you in trouble, Tucker?”
He raised his tearful, grey eyes to me, and said,
“They say I’m not fit to be a preacher!”