The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker

by William Dean Howells

“Well, I just got time to get there,” said the other, putting on his hat, and pushing out of the door.

At the moment Lemuel was lifting his tray of empty broth-bowls, Mr. Sewell was waking for the early quarter-to-eight breakfast, which he thought it right to make—not perhaps as an example to his parishioners, most of whom had the leisure to lie later, but as a sacrifice, not too definite, to the lingering ideal of suffering. He could not work before breakfast—his delicate digestion forbade that—or he would have risen still earlier, and he employed the twenty minutes he had between his bath and his breakfast in skimming the morning paper.

Just at present Mr. Sewell was taking two morning papers: the Advertiser which he had always taken, and a cheap little one-cent paper, which had just been started, and which he had subscribed for experimentally, with the vague impression that he ought to encourage the young men who had established it. He did not like it very well. It was made up somewhat upon the Western ideal, and dealt with local matters in a manner that was at once a little more lively and a little more intimate than he had been used to. But before he had quite made up his mind to stop it, his wife had come to like it on that very account. She said it was interesting. On this point she used her conscience a little less actively than usual, and he had to make her observe that to be interesting was not the whole duty of journalism. It had become a matter of personal pride with them respectively to attack and defend The Sunrise, as I shall call the little sheet, though that was not the name; and Mr. Sewell had lately made some gain through the character of the police reports, which The Sunrise had been developing into a feature. It was not that offensive matters were introduced; the worst cases were in fact rather blinked, but Sewell insisted that the tone of flippant gaiety with which many facts, so serious, so tragic for their perpetrators and victims, were treated was odious. He objected to the court being called a Mill, and prisoners Grists, and the procedure Grinding; he objected to the familiar name of Uncle for the worthy gentleman to whose care certain offenders were confided on probation. He now read that department of The Sunrise the first thing every morning, in the hope of finding something with which to put Mrs. Sewell hopelessly in the wrong, but this morning a heading in the foreign news of the Advertiser caught his eye, and he laid The Sunrise aside to read at the breakfast-table. His wife came down in a cotton dress, as a tribute to the continued warmth of the weather, and said that she had not called the children, because it was Saturday, and they might as well have their sleep out. He liked to see her in that dress; it had a leafy rustling that was pleasant to his ear, and as she looked into the library he gaily put out his hand, which she took, and suffered herself to be drawn toward him. Then she gave him a kiss, somewhat less business-like and preoccupied than usual.

“Well, you've got Lemuel Barker off your mind at last,” she divined, in recognition of her husband's cheerfulness.

“Yes, he's off,” admitted Sewell.

“I hope he'll stay in Willoughby Pastures after this. Of course it puts an end to our going there next summer.” “Oh, I don't know,” Sewell feebly demurred.

“I do,” said his wife, but not despising his insincerity enough to insist that he did also. The mellow note of an apostle's bell—the gift of an aesthetic parishioner—came from below, and she said, “Well, there's breakfast, David,” and went before him down the stairs.

He brought his papers with him. It would have been her idea of heightened cosiness, at this breakfast, which they had once a week alone together, not to have the newspapers, but she saw that he felt differently, and after a number of years of married life a woman learns to let her husband have his own way in some unimportant matters. It was so much his nature to have some sort of reading always in hand, that he was certainly more himself, and perhaps more companionable with his papers than without them.

She merely said, “Let me take the Sunrise,” when she had poured out his coffee, and he had helped her to cantaloupe and steak, and spread his Advertiser beside his plate. He had the Sunrise in his lap.

“No, you may have the Advertiser” he said, handing it over the table to her. “I was down first, and I got both the papers. I'm not really obliged to make any division, but I've seen the Advertiser, and I'm willing to behave unselfishly. If you're very impatient for the police report in the Sunrise I'll read it aloud for you. I think that will be a very good test of its quality, don't you?”