Then began my missionary experience. I was passed from home to home, sometimes staying but three days in one place: the object being both economical and social. The cost of my board, under this arrangement, was very light on each household, and as each hostess was not satisfied unless she gave the “Elder” the very best cooking she could produce, my short stay did not permit any embarrassment to the menu. But more especially this arrangement made it possible for me to know nearly every family in my parishes intimately, as the association with the families at the table was the means of establishing more than a perfunctory friendship. They learned some of my shortcomings, and I was made aware of their needs. When, in the latter part of the summer, I was boarding in Upper Village, in the shadow of the mountain, and went down to Lower Village for a Wednesday evening meeting, one of the households expected me to creep into the house with the eldest son, go into the pantry and “steal” huge slices of blueberry cake. This done, the husband and wife would come into the kitchen, have a hearty laugh, and before I started back for my boarding-place, we would have our serious talk over matters of faith and life.
There were few well-to-do farmers in the community. The distance was too great from the railroads for the injection of much social life. The winters were filled with days when life was grim. Had it not been for the telephone and the mail, the life of that back-road would have been without any great attractions. But the very isolation of the villages, and the absence of many social opportunities through the winter, like a church and preaching, made these farmers the prey of traveling fanatics, who imported here and there the most fanciful conceptions of religion and sought, by all manner of persuasion, to turn people into Mormons and “New Lights,” “Holy Ghosters” and “Disciples.” It did not take long to see that some of these perversions had taken root in some homes, and I found myself having to attempt the feat of constructing a positive and less fanatical doctrine: a feat which at the time I did poorly enough, but which I took pleasure in attempting. But it was not formal doctrine or intellectual discriminations which those parishes needed as much as it was a social man, to impart into their midst, after the austere winter, a joke, a song, a story, and a friendly hand-clasp. If I had preached no sermon, but merely gone from home to home, from field to field, telling men and women and children that I was their friend, I believe that I should have accomplished the major part of the needed ministry.
The meetings were held in the upper rooms of two very solidly constructed schoolhouses four miles apart. Our meetings had to be announced in two kinds of time, for some set their clocks by the sun, while others set them by the Standard, sent over the telephone wires. The dim, chalky atmosphere of the rooms was always colored by rich green ferns and assortments of wild flowers. Even though the flowers were bunched in the necks of mustard bottles, tumblers, and cream jugs, and not always arranged according to Japanese art, yet the thought that the sense of beauty in religion found expression even in wild flowers apologized for all else. When the hob-nailed boot and the plow, year in and out, are uprooting and crushing field flowers, it marks the high tide of esthetic appreciation when the wearers of the hob-nailed boot and guiders of the plow take pains to pick those flowers and add them to their hymns, their prayers, and sermons in praise to God.
No small, narrow opportunity was mine, such as in my gloomier moments I had ascribed to a country pastor. Preaching a sermon formed but a fraction of my duty. There were young men and women who sought advice about the outside world, and their business chances in it. There were business colleges, academies, hospitals, and mills to propose to the restless ones, who, like young birds, were to try life on their own wings.
Entwined in the pastoral work, were many social pleasures that made my body strong and rested my nerves: adventures over the high hills for soul-subduing vistas of mountains and lakes; trout fries by the side of meadow brooks; picnics by the river; visits to bark-peeling camps, over corduroy roads, and encampment on a lake shore where at night the wild birds gave voice and were interpreted to us by a guide.
The golden-rod lined the dusty road at last, and the purple flowers took the place of the lighter summer ones, and it was time for me to return to the Seminary. The services were crowded that last Sunday; mothers brought their babies and did not care if the little ones did compete with me, in voice. I knew what was in the faces, as they looked intently on me, as I preached. They were thinking that this would probably be the last preaching they would hear until the following summer, unless some stray, itinerant evangelist strolled that way and opened up the schoolhouse for an evening. There were many tearful farewells, and then the people went out into the night. It was a clear night of stars and chill. As I left the schoolhouse, having bade good-bye to the janitor, for I was due to leave on the next morning’s stage, a young farmer stepped out from the deep shadow of an oak near the flag-staff and accosted me with,
“Say, Elder, do you care to go up the road a piece?”
I responded that I should enjoy a walk and a chat with him.
While we walked between two walls of trees, our way dimly outlined by the faint flicker of the stars, my friend said,
“I’m one of the bashful sort, Elder. You know that; but I didn’t want you to leave without having me tell you how much you have helped my folks this summer. The time you come in our house and played and sang at the organ for us, and cheered us up with a laugh, why it made things different in our house. Since mother died, we’ve been having a hard row to hoe, and you don’t know how much we’ve appreciated the cheering up you give us. It gets terrible lonesome out here through the winter, and I want to thank you for all that you’ve done!”