"I tell you what let's do!" he exclaimed."Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long walk, way out into the country.You've never seen the basin, where they float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills.The hills beyond give you almost mountain effects, they are so steep;and they say there's a sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees all about it;and we could take some sandwiches with us--""You forget," put in Mrs.Ware,--"those trustees are coming at eleven.""So they are!" assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs, and, turning, went indoors.
He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work.
Then he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books that constituted his library.
He saw nothing which he wanted to read.Finally he did take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids half closed themselves in sign of revery.
This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were going to dislike so much.
The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking there;but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in tender review.He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of "milkers" coming lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with their own skilled hands.Of course, he admitted to himself, it would not be the same if he were to go back there again.He was conscious of having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of knives and forks.
But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously abundant and free.
It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should he not say of all his days?--had come to him.There he had first seen Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.
How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and all-beneficent the miracle still appeared!
Though herself the daughter of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times more countrified than it had ever been before.
She was fresh from the refinements of a town seminary:
she read books; it was known that she could play upon the piano.Her clothes, her manners, her way of speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of the neighborhood.
These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the world that their young minister should be visibly "taken" with her.
Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance.
His new appointment was to Tyre--a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and substance--and he was to be married only a day or so before entering upon his pastoral duties there.The good people among whom he had begun his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride while she was "visiting round"their countryside.In part by jocose inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice--they had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and winter with friendly zest.
When he returned from the Conference, to say good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a "donation"--quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their contributions in the house where he boarded.
He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes, thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes, cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.
Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the beginning.
