 | CHAPTER XXXIV.
OUR MINISTER IN CLOUDLAND. Oldtown folks |  |
34. CHAPTER XXXIV.
OUR MINISTER IN CLOUDLAND.
THE picture of our life in Cloudland, and of the developing
forces which were there brought to bear upon us, would be
incomplete without the portrait of the minister.
Even during the course of my youth, the principles of democratic
equality introduced and maintained in the American Revolution
were greatly changing the social position and standing
of the clergy. Ministers like Dr. Lothrop, noble men of the
theocracy, men of the cocked hat, were beginning to pass away,
or to appear among men only as venerable antiquities, and the
present order of American citizen clergy was coming in.
Mr. Avery was a cheerful, busy, manly man, who posed himself
among men as a companion and fellow-citizen, whose word on
any subject was to go only so far as its own weight and momentum
should carry it. His preaching was a striking contrast to
the elegant Addisonian essays of Parson Lothrop. It was a
vehement address to our intelligent and reasoning powers, — an
address made telling by a back force of burning enthusiasm.
Mr. Avery preached a vigorous system of mental philosophy in
theology, which made our Sundays, on the whole, about as intense
an intellectual drill as any of our week-days. If I could describe
its character by any one word, I should call it manly
preaching.
Every person has a key-note to his mind which determines all
its various harmonies. The key-note of Mr. Avery's mind was
“the free agency of man.” Free agency was with him the universal
solvent, the philosopher's stone in theology; every line of
his sermons said to every human being, “You are free, and you
are able.” And the great object was to intensify to its highest
point, in every human being, the sense of individual, personal
responsibility.
Of course, as a Calvinist, he found food for abundant discourse
in reconciling this absolute freedom of man with those declarations
in the standards of the Church which assert the absolute
government of God over all his creatures and all their actions.
But the cheerfulness and vigor with which he drove and interpreted
and hammered in the most contradictory statements, when
they came in the way of his favorite ideas, was really quite
inspiring.
During the year we had a whole course of systematic theology,
beginning with the history of the introduction of moral evil, the
fall of the angels, and the consequent fall of man and the work
of redemption resulting therefrom. In the treatment of all these
subjects, the theology and imagery of Milton figured so largely
that one might receive the impression that Paradise Lost was
part of the sacred canon.
Mr. Avery not only preached these things in the pulpit, but
talked them out in his daily life. His system of theology was to
him the vital breath of his being. His mind was always running
upon it, and all nature was, in his sight, giving daily tributary
illustrations to it. In his farming, gardening, hunting, or fishing,
he was constantly finding new and graphic forms of presenting
his favorite truths. The most abstract subject ceased to be
abstract in his treatment of it, but became clothed upon with the
homely, every-day similes of common life.
I have the image of the dear good man now, as I have seen
him, seated on a hay-cart, mending a hoe-handle, and at the same
moment vehemently explaining to an inquiring brother minister
the exact way that Satan first came to fall, as illustrating how a
perfectly holy mind can be tempted to sin. The familiarity that
he showed with the celestial arcana, — the zeal with which he
vindicated his Maker, — the perfect knowledge that he seemed to
have of the strategic plans of the evil powers in the first great
insurrection, — are traits strongly impressed on my memory.
They seemed as vivid and as much a matter of course to his
mind as if he had read them out of a weekly newspaper.
Mr. Avery indulged the fond supposition that he had solved
the great problem of the origin of evil in a perfectly satisfactory
his reasoning in a series of questions, thus: —
“Has not God power to make any kind of thing he pleases?”
“Yes.”
“Then he can make a kind of being incapable of being governed
except by motive?”
“Yes.”
“Then, when he has made that kind of being, he cannot govern
them except by motive, can he?”
“No.”
“Now if there is no motive in existence strong enough to
govern them by, he cannot keep them from falling, can he?”
“No.”
“You see then the necessity of moral evil; there must be
experience of evil to work out motive.”
The Calvinism of Mr. Avery, though sharp and well defined,
was not dull, as abstractions often are, nor gloomy and fateful
like that of Dr. Stern. It was permeated through and through
by cheerfulness and hope.
Mr. Avery was one of the kind of men who have a passion
for saving souls. If there is such a thing as apostolic succession,
this passion is what it ought to consist in. It is what ought to
come with the laying on of hands, if the laying on of hands is
what it is sometimes claimed to be.
Mr. Avery was a firm believer in hell, but he believed also
that nobody need go there, and he was determined, so far as he
was concerned, that nobody should go there if he could help it.
Such a tragedy as the loss of any one soul in his parish he
could not and would not contemplate for a moment; and he had
such a firm belief in the truths he preached, that he verily expected
with them to save anybody that would listen to him.
Goethe says, “Blessed is the man who believes that he has an
idea by which he may help his fellow-creatures.” Mr. Avery
was exactly that man. He had such faith in what he preached
that he would have gone with it to Satan himself, could he have
secured a dispassionate and unemployed hour, with a hope of
bringing him round.
Generous and ardent in his social sympathies, Mr. Avery never
could be brought to believe that any particular human being
had finally perished. At every funeral he attended he contrived
to see a ground for hope that the departed had found
mercy. Even the slightest hints of repentance were magnified in
his warm and hopeful mode of presentation. He has been known
to suggest to a distracted mother, whose thoughtless boy had
been suddenly killed by a fall from a horse, the possibilities of
the merciful old couplet, —
Mercy was sought, and mercy found.”
Like most of the New England ministers, Mr. Avery was a
warm believer in the millennium. This millennium was the favorite
recreation ground, solace, and pasture land, where the New
England ministry fed their hopes and courage. Men of large
hearts and warm benevolence, their theology would have filled
them with gloom, were it not for this overplus of joy and peace
to which human society on earth was in their view tending.
Thousands of years, when the poor old earth should produce only
a saintly race of perfected human beings, were to them some compensation
for the darkness and losses of the great struggle.
Mr. Avery believed, not only that the millennium was coming,
but that it was coming fast, and, in fact, was at the door. Every
political and social change announced it. Our Revolution was a
long step towards it, and the French Revolution, now in progress,
was a part of that distress of nations which heralded it; and every
month, when the Columbia Magazine brought in the news from
Europe, Mr. Avery rushed over to Mr. Rossiter, and called him
to come and hear how the thing was going.
Mr. Rossiter took upon himself that right which every freeborn
Yankee holds sacred, — the right of contravening his minister.
Though, if he caught one of his boys swelling or ruffling
with any opposing doctrine, he would scath and scorch the youngster
with contemptuous irony, and teach him to comport himself
modestly in talking of his betters, yet it was the employment of
a great many of his leisure hours to run argumentative tilts
against Mr. Avery. Sometimes, when we were sitting in our
of voices and clangor of assertion and contradiction would come
up from among the tassels of the corn, where the two were hoeing
together in the garden, as would have alarmed people less
accustomed to the vigorous manners of both the friends.
“Now, Rossiter, that will never do. Your system would upset
moral government entirely. Not an angel could be kept in his
place upon your supposition.”
“It is not my supposition. I have n't got any supposition, and
I don't want any; but I was telling you that, if you must have a
theory of the universe, Origen's was a better one than yours.”
“And I say that Origen's system would upset everything, and
you ought to let it alone.”
“I sha' n't let it alone!”
“Why, Rossiter, you will destroy responsibility, and annihilate
all the motives of God's government.”
“That 's just what you theologians always say. You think the
universe will go to pieces if we upset your pine-shingle theology.”
“Rossiter, you must be careful how you spread your ideas.”
“I don't want to spread my ideas; I don't want to interfere
with your system. It 's the best thing you can make your
people take, but you ought to know that no system is anything
more than human theory.”
“It 's eternal truth.”
“There 's truth in it, but it is n't eternal truth.”
“It 's Bible.”
“Part, and part Milton and Edwards, and part Mr. Avery.”
Harry and I were like adopted sons in both families, and the
two expressed their minds about each other freely before us.
Mr. Avery would say: “The root of the matter is in Rossiter.
I don't doubt that he 's a really regenerate man, but he has a
head that works strangely. We must wait for him, he 'll come
along by and by.”
And Mr. Rossiter would say of Mr. Avery: “That 's a growing
man, boys; he has n't made his terminal buds yet. Some men
make them quick, like lilac-bushes. They only grow a little way
and stop. And some grow all the season through, like locusttrees.
and growing, particularly if he has me to fight him on all hands.
He 'll grow into different opinions on a good many subjects,
before he dies.”
It was this implied liberty of growth — the liberty to think and
to judge freely upon all subjects — that formed the great distinctive
educational force of New England life, particularly in this
period of my youth. Monarchy, aristocracy, and theocracy, with
their peculiar trains of ideas, were passing away, and we were
coming within the sweep of pure republican influences, in which
the individual is everything. Mr. Avery's enthusiastic preaching
of free agency and personal responsibility was more than an individual
impulse. It was the voice of a man whose ideas were the
reflection of a period in American history. While New England
theology was made by loyal monarchists, it reflected monarchical
ideas. The rights and immunities of divine sovereignty were its
favorite topics. When, as now, the government was becoming
settled in the hands of the common people, the freedom of the
individual, his absolute power of choice, and the consequent
reasonableness of the duties he owed to the Great Sovereign
Authority, began to be the favorite subjects of the pulpit.
Mr. Avery's preaching was immensely popular. There were
in Cloudland only about half a dozen families of any prestige as
to ancestral standing or previous wealth and cultivation. The
old aristocratic idea was represented only in the one street that
went over Cloudland Hill, where was a series of wide, cool,
roomy, elm-shadowed houses, set back in deep door-yards, and
flanked with stately, well-tended gardens. The doctor, the lawyer,
the sheriff of the county, the schoolmaster, and the minister,
formed here a sort of nucleus; but outlying in all the hills
and valleys round were the mountain and valley farmers. Their
houses sat on high hills or sunk in deep valleys, and their flaming
windows at morning and evening looked through the encircling
belts of forest solitudes as if to say, “We are here, and we
are a power.” These hard-working farmers formed the body
of Mr. Avery's congregation. Sunday morning, when the little
bell pealed out its note of invitation loud and long over the
well-filled farm-wagons, which, punctual as the village-clock
itself, came streaming from the east and west, the north and
south. Past the parsonage they streamed, with the bright cheeks
and fluttering ribbons of the girls, and the cheery, rubicund
faces of children, and with the inevitable yellow dog of the
family faithfully pattering in the rear. The audience that filled
the rude old meeting-house every Sunday would have astonished
the men who only rode through the village of a week-day. For
this set of shrewd, toil-hardened, vigorous, full-blooded republicans
I can think of no preaching more admirably adapted than Mr.
Avery's. It was preaching that was on the move, as their minds
were, and which was slowly shaping out and elaborating those
new forms of doctrinal statement that inevitably grow out of
new forms of society. Living, as these men did, a lonely,
thoughtful, secluded life, without any of the thousand stimulants
which railroads and magazine and newspaper literature cast
into our existence, their two Sunday sermons were the great
intellectual stimulus which kept their minds bright, and they
were listened to with an intense interest of which the scattered
and diversified state of modern society gives few examples.
They felt the compliment of being talked to as if they were capable
of understanding the very highest of subjects, and they
liked it. Each hard, heroic nature flashed like a flint at the
grand thought of a free agency with which not even their Maker
would interfere. Their God himself asked to reign over them,
not by force, but by the free, voluntary choice of their own
hearts. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve. If the
Lord be God, serve him, and if Baal be God, serve him,” was
a grand appeal, fit for freemen.
The reasoning on moral government, on the history of man,
— the theories of the universe past, present, and to come, —
opened to these men a grand Miltonic poem, in which their own
otherwise commonplace lives shone with a solemn splendor.
Without churches or cathedrals or physical accessories to quicken
their poetic nature, their lives were redeemed only by this poetry
of ideas.
Calvinism is much berated in our days, but let us look at the
political, social, and materialistic progress of Calvinistic countries,
and ask if the world is yet far enough along to dispense with it
altogether. Look at Spain at this hour, and look back at New
England at the time of which I write, — both having just finished
a revolution, both feeling their way along the path of national
independence, — and compare the Spanish peasantry with
the yeomen of New England, such as made up Mr. Avery's congregation;
— the one set made by reasoning, active-minded Calvinism,
the other by pictures, statues, incense, architecture, and
all the sentimental paraphernalia of ritualism.
If Spain had had not a single cathedral, if her Murillos had
been all sunk in the sea, and if she had had, for a hundred years
past, a set of schoolmasters and ministers working together as I
have described Mr. Avery and Mr. Rossiter as working, would
not Spain be infinitely better off for this life at least, whether
there is any life to come or not? This is a point that I humbly
present to the consideration of society.
Harry and I were often taken by Mr. Avery on his preaching
tours to the distant farm parishes. There was a brown
school-house in this valley, and a red school-house in that, and
another on the hill, and so on for miles around, and Mr. Avery
kept a constant stream of preaching going in one or other of
these every evening. We liked these expeditions with him, because
they were often excursions amid the wildest and most
romantic of the mountain scenery, and we liked them furthermore
because Mr. Avery was a man that made himself, for the
time being, companionable to every creature of human shape
that was with him.
With boys he was a boy, — a boy in the vigor of his animal life,
his keen delight in riding, hunting, fishing. With farmers he
was a farmer. Brought up on a farm, familiar during all his
early days with its wholesome toils, he still had a farmer's eye
and a farmer's estimates, and the working-people felt him bone
of their bone, and flesh of their flesh. It used to be a saying
among them, that, when Mr. Avery hoed more than usual in his
potato-field, the Sunday sermon was sure to be better.
But the best sport of all was when some of Mr. Avery's
preaching tours would lead up the course of a fine mountain troutbrook
in the vicinity. Then sometimes Mr. Rossiter, Mr. Avery,
Harry, and I would put our supper in our pockets, and start with
the sun an hour or two high, designing to bring up at the red
school-house, as the weekly notice phrased it, at “early candle-lighting.”
A person who should accidentally meet Mr. Avery on one of
these tours, never having seen him before, might imagine him to
be a man who had never thought or dreamed of anything but
catching trout all his days, he went into it with such abandon.
Eye, voice, hand, thought, feeling, all were concentrated on trout.
He seemed to have the quick perception, the rapid hand, and
the noiseless foot of an Indian, and the fish came to his hook as
if drawn there by magic. So perfectly absorbed was he that
we would be obliged to jog his memory, and, in fact, often to
drag him away by main force, when the hour for the evening
lecture arrived. Then our spoils would be hid away among
the bushes, and with wet feet he would hurry in; but, once
in, he was as completely absorbed in his work of saving sinners
as he had before been in his temporal fishery. He argued,
illustrated, stated, guarded, answered objections, looking the
while from one hard, keen, shrewd face to another, to see if he
was being understood. The phase of Calvinism shown in my
grandmother's blue book had naturally enough sowed through
the minds of a thoughtful community hosts of doubts and queries.
A great part of Mr. Avery's work was to remove these doubts
by substituting more rational statements. It was essential that
he should feel that he had made a hit somewhere, said something
that answered a purpose in the minds of his hearers, and
helped them at least a step or two on their way.
After services were over, I think of him and Mr. Rossiter
cheerily arguing with and contradicting each other a little beyond
us in the road, while Harry and I compared our own notes behind.
Arrived at the parsonage, there would be Tina and Esther
coming along the street to meet us. Tina full of careless,
open, gay enthusiasm, Esther with a shy and wistful welcome,
were displayed and exulted over; the supper-table was laid,
and Mr. Avery, Mr. Rossiter, and we boys applied ourselves to
dressing our fish; and then Mr. Avery, disdaining Dinah, and,
in fact, all female supervision, presided himself over the frying-pan,
and brought our woodland captives on the table in a state
worthy of a trout brook. It should have comforted the very
soul of a trout taken in our snares to think how much was made
of him, and how perfectly Mr. Avery respected his dignity, and
did him justice in his cookery.
We two boys were in fact domesticated as sons in the family.
Although our boarding-place was with the master, we were almost
as much with the minister as if we had been of his household.
We worked in his garden, we came over and sat with
Esther and Tina. Our windows faced their windows, so that in
study hours we could call to one another backward and forward,
and tell where the lesson began, and what the root of the verb
was, or any other message that came into our heads. Sometimes,
of a still summer morning, while we were gravely digging
at our lessons, we would hear Esther in tones of expostulation
at some madcap impulse of Tina, and, looking across, would see
her bursting out in some freak of droll pantomimic performance,
and then an immediate whirlwind of gayety would seize us all.
We would drop our dictionaries and grammars, rush together,
and have a general outbreak of jollity.
In general, Tina was a most praiseworthy and zealous student,
and these wild, sudden whisks of gayety seemed only the escape-valves
by which her suppressed spirits vented themselves; but,
when they came, they were perfectly irresistible. She devoted
herself to Esther with that sympathetic adaptation which seemed
to give her power over every nature. She was interested in her
housekeeping, in all its departments, as if it had been her own
glory and pride; and Tina was one that took glory and pride in
everything of her friends, as if it had been her own. Esther
had been left by the death of her mother only the year before
the mistress of the parsonage. The great unspoken sorrow of
this loss lay like a dark chasm between her and her father, each
cheerfulness.
Esther, strong as was her intellectual life, had that intense
sense of the worth of a well-ordered household, and of the dignity
of house-economies, which is characteristic of New England women.
Her conscientiousness pervaded every nook and corner
of her domestic duties with a beautiful perfection; nor did she
ever feel tempted to think that her fine mental powers were a
reason why these homely details should be considered a slavery.
Household cares are a drudgery only when unpervaded by sentiment.
When they are an offering of love, a ministry of care
and devotion to the beloved, every detail has its interest.
There were certain grand festivals of a minister's family which
fill a housekeeper's heart and hands, and in which all of us made
common interest with her. The Association was a reunion when
all the ministers of the county met together and spent a social
day with the minister, dining together, and passing their time in
brotherly converse, such as reading essays, comparing sermons,
taking counsel with each other in all the varied ups and downs
of their pastoral life. The Consociation was another meeting of
the clergy, but embracing also with each minister a lay delegate,
and thus uniting, not only the ministry, but the laymen of the
county, in a general fraternal religious conference.
The first Association that Esther had to manage quite alone as
sole mistress of the parsonage occurred while we were with her.
Like most solemn festivals of New England, these seasons were
announced under the domestic roof by great preparatory poundings
and choppings, by manufacture, on a large scale, of cakes,
pies, and provisions for the outer man; and at this time Harry,
Tina, and I devoted all our energies, and made ourselves everywhere
serviceable. We ran to the store on errands, we chopped
mince for pies with a most virtuous pertinacity, we cut citron
and stoned raisins, we helped put up curtains and set up bedsteads.
We were all of us as resolved as Esther that the housekeeping
of the little parsonage should be found without speek or
flaw, and should reflect glory upon her youthful sovereignty.
Some power or other gilded and glorified these happy days, —
that we four did together so harmonious and so charming?
“Friendship, only friendship,” sang Tina, with silver tongue.
“Such a perfect friendship,” she remarked, “was never known
except just in our particular case”; it exceeded all the classical
records, all the annals, ancient and modern.
But what instinct or affinity in friendship made it a fact
that when we four sat at table together, with our lessons before
us, Harry somehow was always found on Esther's side? I used
to notice it because his golden-brown mat of curls was such
a contrast to the smooth, shining black satin bands of her hair as
they bent together over the dictionary, and looked up innocently
into each other's eyes, talking of verbs and adjectives and terminations,
innocently conjugating “amo, amare” to each other.
Was it friendship that made Esther's dark, clear eyes, instinctively
look towards Harry for his opinion, when we were reading
our compositions to one another? Was it friendship, that starry
brightness that began to come in Harry's eyes, and made them
seem darker and bluer and deeper, with a sort of mysterious
meaning, when he looked at Esther? Was it friendship that
seemed to make him feel taller, stronger, more manly, when
he thought of her, and that always placed him at her hand
when there was some household task that required a manly height
or handiness? It was Harry and Esther together who put up the
white curtains all through the parsonage that spring, that made
it look so trim and comely for the ministers' meeting. Last
year, Esther said, innocently, she had no one to help her, and
the work tired her so. How happy, how busy, how bright
they were as they measured and altered, and Harry, in
boundless complacency, went up and down at her orders, and
changed and altered and arranged, till her fastidious eye was
satisfied, and every fold hung aright! It was Harry who took
down and cleansed the family portraits, and hung them again,
and balanced them so nicely; it was Harry who papered over
a room where the walls had been disfigured by an accident,
and it was Esther by him who cut the paper and trimmed
the bordering and executed all her little sovereignties of taste
time gathered green boughs and ground-pine for the vases,
and made floral decorations without end, till the bare little parsonage
looked like a woodland bower.
I have pleasant recollections of those ministers' meetings.
Calvinistic doctrines, in their dry, abstract form, are, I confess,
rather hard; but Calvinistic ministers, so far as I have ever had
an opportunity to observe, are invariably a jolly set of fellows.
In those early days the ministry had not yet felt the need of
that generous decision which led them afterwards to forego all
dangerous stimulants, as an example to their flock. A long
green wooden case, full of tobacco-pipes and a quantity of
papers of tobacco, used to be part of the hospitable stock prepared
for the reception of the brethren. No less was there
a quantity of spirituous liquor laid in. In those days its dispensation
was regarded as one of the inevitable duties of hospitality.
The New England ministry of this period were men full of
interest. Each one was the intellectual centre of his own
district, and supplied around him the stimulus which is now
brought to bear through a thousand other sources. It was
the minister who overlooked the school, who put parents upon
the idea of giving their sons liberal educations. In poor districts
the minister often practised medicine, and drew wills and
deeds, thus supplying the place of both lawyer and doctor. Apart
from their doctrinal theology, which was a constant source of
intellectual activity to them, their secluded life led them to many
forms of literary labor.
As a specimen of these, it is recorded of the Rev. Mr. Taylor
of Westfield, that he took such delight in the writings
of Origen, that, being unable to purchase them, he copied them
in four quarto volumes, that he might have them for his own
study. These are still in the possession of his descendants.
Other instances of literary perseverance and devotion, equally
curious, might be cited.
The lives that these men led were simple and tranquil. Almost
all of them were practical farmers, preserving about them
the fresh sympathies and interests of the soil, and laboring enough
indigestion. Mingling very little with the world, each one a sort
of autocrat in his way, in his own district, and with an idea of
stability and perpetuity in his office, which, in these days, does
not belong to the position of a minister anywhere, these men
developed many originalities and peculiarities of character, to
which the simple state of society then allowed full scope. They
were humorists, — like the mossy old apple-trees which each of
them had in his orchard, bending this way and turning that, and
throwing out their limbs with quaint twists and jerks, yet
none the less acceptable, so long as the fruit they bore was
sound and wholesome.
We have read of “Handkerchief Moody,” who for some years
persisted in always appearing among men with his face covered
with a handkerchief, — an incident which Hawthorne has worked
up in his weird manner into the story of “The Minister with the
Black Veil.”
Father Mills, of Torringford, was a gigantic man who used to
appear in the pulpit in a full-bottomed white horse-hair wig. On
the loss of a beloved wife, he laid aside his wig for a year, and
appeared in the pulpit with his head tied up in a black handkerchief,
representing to the good housewives of his parish that,
as he always dressed in black, he could in no other way testify
to his respect for his dear wife's memory; and this tribute was
accepted by his parish with the same innocent simplicity with
which it was rendered.
On the whole, the days which brought all the brother ministers
to the parsonage were days of enlivenment to all us young people.
They seemed to have such a hearty joy in their meeting,
and to deliver themselves up to mirth and good-fellowship with
such a free and hearty abandon, and the jokes and stories which
they brought with them were chorused by such roars of merriment,
as made us think a ministers' meeting the most joyous
thing on earth.
I know that some say this jocund mirthfulness indicated a
want of faith in the doctrines they taught. But do not you and
I, honest friends, often profess our belief in things which it would
notwithstanding which we eat and drink and sleep joyously?
You read in your morning paper that the city of so-and-so has
been half submerged by an earthquake, and that after the earthquake
came a fire and burnt the crushed inhabitants alive in the
ruins of their dwellings. Nay, if you are an American, you may
believe some such catastrophe to have happened on the Erie
Railroad a day or two before, and that men, women, and children
have been cooped up and burnt, in lingering agonies, in your own
vicinity. And yet, though you believe these things, you laugh
and talk and are gay, and plan for a party in the evening and a
ride on the same road the next week.
No; man was mercifully made with the power of ignoring
what he believes. It is all that makes existence in a life like
this tolerable. And our ministers, conscious of doing the very
best they can to keep the world straight, must be allowed their
laugh and joke, sin and Satan to the contrary notwithstanding.
There was only one brother, in the whole confraternity that
used to meet at Mr. Avery's, who was not a married man; and
he, in spite of all the snares and temptations which must beset a
minister who guides a female flock of parishioners, had come to
the afternoon of life in the state of bachelorhood. But O the
jokes and witticisms which always set the room in a roar at his
expense! It was a subject that never wearied or grew old. To
clap Brother Boardman on the back and inquire for Mrs. Boardman,
— to joke him about some suitable widow, or bright-eyed
young lamb of his flock, at each ministers' meeting, — was a provocative
of mirth ever fresh and ever young. But the undaunted
old bachelor was always a match for these attacks, and had his
rejoinder ready to fling back into the camp of the married men.
He was a model of gallant devotion to womanhood in the
abstract, and seemed loath to give up to one what was meant
for womankind. So, the last that I ever heard of him, he was
still unmarried, — a most unheard-of thing for a New England
parson.
Mr. Avery was a leader among the clergy of his State. His
zeal, enthusiasm, eloquence, and doctrinal vigor, added to a
made him a sort of chief among them.
What joyous hours they spent together in the ins and the
outs, the highways and by-ways, of metaphysics and theology!
Harry and Esther and Tina and I learned them all. We
knew all about the Arminians and Pelagians and the Tasters
and the Exercisers, and made a deal of fun with each other
over it in our private hours. We knew precisely every shade
of difference between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee which the
different metaphysicians had invented, and tossed our knowledge
joyously back and forward at one another in our gayer
hours, just as the old ministers did, when they smoked and
argued in the great parsonage dining-room. Everything is
joyful that is learned by two young men in company with two
young women with whom they are secretly in love. Mathematics,
metaphysics, or no matter what of dry and desolate, buds and
blossoms as the rose under such circumstances.
Did you ever go out in the misty gray of morning dawn, when
the stars had not yet shut their eyes, and still there were rosy
bands lying across the east? And then have you watched a trellis
of morning-glories, with all the buds asleep, but ready in one
hour to waken? The first kiss of sunlight and they will be open!
That was just where we were.
| CHAPTER XXXIV.
OUR MINISTER IN CLOUDLAND. Oldtown folks | |