Part 4

"Oh, yes." The minister is so glad to get the place that he feels generous. But the good man stays eleven months; and he has besides his wife and child, a mother-in-law, a grandmother-in-law, a niece, a _protégée_, and a young man, a nephew, who has come to get an education and do the chores. They are all very nice people, but it leaves the minute-man and his wife and four children with but three rooms. The beds must stand so that the children have to climb over the head-boards to get at them. The family sit by the big stove at their meals, and can look out on the glowing sand and see the swifts darting about; while in the winter the study is sitting-room and playground too.

But this is luxury. Often the minute-man must be content with one room, for which the rent charged may be extortionate. Even then he must keep his water in a barrel out in the hall. In cold weather perhaps it must be chopped before getting it into the kettle.

I knew of one man who lived in a log house. It had been lathed and plastered on the inside, and weather-boarded on the outside, so that it was very warm, and so thick that you could not hear the storms outside, which raged at times for days together.

One day late in March a fearful snowstorm arose, and for three days and nights the snow came thick and fast. Luckily it thawed fast too. On the fourth day there was need for the minute-man to go for the doctor, who lived some miles away. On the road he engaged a woman to go to his house, where her services were in demand. After he had summoned the doctor the good man took his time, and reached home in the afternoon. He was greeted by a duet from two young strangers from a far land.

Night closed in fast; the house was so thick that no one suspected another storm; but on going out to milk the cow, it was storming again, and the man saw he had need to be careful or he would not find his way back from the barn, though it was only a few yards away.

When he reached the house, the good lady visitor, who had insisted that she could not stay later than evening, gave up all hope of getting home that night. She stayed a fortnight! For this time the storm raged without thawing, and for three nights and days the snow piled up over the windows, and almost covered the little pines, in drifts fifteen feet deep. Not a horse came by for two weeks.

Once another man started in a storm on a similar errand; but in spite of his love, courage, and despair, he was overwhelmed, and sinking in agony in the drift, he never moved again. When the storm was over, the sun came out; and what a mockery it seemed! The squirrels ran nimbly up the trees, the blue jays called merrily; but the settlers looked over the white expanse, and missed the gray smoke that usually rose from the little log shanty.

The men gathered to break the roads; the ox-team and snow-plough were brought out, and the dogs were wild with delight as they ploughed up the snow with their snouts, and barked for very joy; but the men were sorrowful, and worked as for life and death. Half way to the house the husband was found motionless as a statue, his blue eyes gazing up into the sky. The men redoubled their efforts, and gained the house. The stoutest heart quailed. A poor cat was mewing piteously in the window. And when at last the oldest man went in, he found mother and new-born child frozen to death.

VII.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN THE SOUTH.

The South has two kinds of frontier,--that which has never been settled, and once thickly settled parts that have grown up to wild woods and wastes since the war. In old times the slave had a half-holiday on Saturday, which custom the colored brother still keeps up; and a more picturesque scene is not to be found than that presented by a town, say of three thousand inhabitants, where the county has seven colored people to one white.

Never was such a motley company gathered in one place,--old men with grizzled heads, all with a rabbit-foot in their pocket, a necklace for a charm around their necks, their bronzed breasts open to view; old mammies with scarlet bandannas; young belles of all shades--here a mulatto girl in pale-blue dress and pointed shoes, her waist as disfigured as any Parisian's, there a mammoth, coal-black negro driving a pair of splendid mules.

Here is an original turnout; it was once a sulky. The shafts stick out above the great ears of the mule; the seat has been replaced by an old rocking-chair; the wheels are wired-up pieces of a small barrel that have replaced some of the spokes, while fully half the harness is made up of rope, string, and wire. The owner's clothes are one mass of patchwork, and his hat is full of holes, out of which the unruly wool escapes and keeps his hat from blowing off.

The sidewalk presents a moving panorama unmatched for richness of color. As we leave the town, we ride past plantations that once had palatial residences, whose owners had from one to three thousand slaves, the little log cabins arranged around and near the house. In many cases the houses are still there, but dilapidated.

Here, where each white person was once worth on an average thirty thousand dollars, to-day you may buy land for a dollar an acre, with all the buildings. It is a lovely park-like country, with clear streams running through meadows, branching into a dozen channels, where the fish dart about; and the trees shade and perfume the air with their rich blossoms, and the whole region is made exquisitely vocal with the song of the peerless mocking-bird. Here, too, the marble crops out from the soil, and some of the richest iron ore in the world, all waiting for the spirit of enterprise to turn the land into an Eldorado.

To be sure, there are obstacles; but the Southern man of to-day was born into conditions for which he is not responsible, any more than his father and ancestors before him were responsible for theirs. And those that started the trouble lived in a day when men knew no better. Did not old John Hawkins as he sailed the seas in his good ship Jesus, packed with Guinea negroes, praise God for his great success? So we find the men of that day piously presenting their pastor and the church with a good slave, and considering it a meritorious action.

Time, with colonies settling in the new South, will yet bring back prosperity without the old taint, and keep step with all that is good in the nation. It cannot be done at once. I knew an energetic American who had built a town, and thought he would go South, and at least start another; but, said he, "I had not been there a week when I felt, as I rocked to and fro, listening to the music of the birds, and catching the fragrance of the jessamine, that I did not care whether school kept or not."

There is no great virtue in the activity that walks fast to keep from freezing. We owe a large portion of our goodness to Jack Frost.

Dr. Ryder tells a story of one of our commercial travellers who had been overtaken by night, and had slept in the home of a poor white. In the morning he naturally asked whether he could wash. "Ye can, I reckon, down to the branch." A little boy belonging to the house followed him; for such clothes and jewellery the lad had never before seen. After seeing the man wash, shave, and clean his teeth, he could hold in no longer, and said,--

"Mister, do you wash every day?"

"Yep."

"And scrape yer face with that knife?"

"Yep."

"And rub yer teeth too?"

"Yep."

"Wal, yer must be an awful lot of trouble to yerself."

Civilization undoubtedly means an awful lot of trouble.

VIII.

ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN.

The frontier is the place to find all sorts of conditions and also of men. Monotony is not one of the troubles of the minute-man. He is frequently too poor to dress in a ministerial style, and quite often he is not known until he begins the services. This sometimes leads to the serio-comic, as witness the following:--

Our man was looking over a portion of the country where he wished to locate, and in making the necessary inquiries he asked many questions about homesteads and timber claims. Notice having been given that there would be preaching at the schoolhouse, the people assembled; and while waiting for the preacher, they discussed this stranger, whom they all thought to be a claim jumper. He certainly was not a very handsome man. They proposed to hang him to the first tree. Trees were scarce there, and possibly that fact saved him. He came up while they were talking, entered the schoolhouse, and from the desk told them he was the preacher, and was going to settle among them. Here was a promising field, where people were ready to hang a man on their way to church. It is a fact that where we find people ready for deeds of this kind we have the material for old-fashioned revivals of the Cartwright type.

When Jesse James was shot, it was easy to find a man to preach a sermon full of hope to the bereaved relations, and to crown the ruffian with martyrdom.

The minute-man has some hair-breadth escapes. He comes upon a crowd of so-called vigilants, who have just hanged some men for horse-thievery; and, as he has on store-clothes, he narrowly escapes the same fate. In one instance he was able to prove too late that they had hanged an innocent lad; and in that case the poor boy had not only pleaded his innocence but had explained that he was tired, and had been invited to ride by the gang who had stolen the horses, the men themselves corroborating his story; but it did not avail; and the poor boy was strung up, and a mother's heart was broken in the far East. Often these border ruffians act from unaccountable impulse, just as the Indians would torture some captives and adopt others from mere whim.

It is an awful commentary on the condition of things on our frontiers, that a man has a better chance of escape when he has murdered a fellow creature than when he has stolen a horse. And yet in this year 1895, I have seen a man who was trying in vain to sell a horse for $1.50.

To illustrate how much more valuable life is than gold, a minister relates this anecdote of a California miner who, to save a young girl in a shipwreck, threw his belt of gold away and saved her life. After the meeting was over a matronly woman came up to him and said, "Sir, I was the young girl the miner saved." Or he enters a log house, and finds a beautiful woman and her no less beautiful daughter, and soon learns that, a few years before, they were moving among the brilliant throng that surround royalty in Europe; and in that little room the mother has the dress and some of the jewels in which she was presented to Queen Victoria. He finds them in the little log house, apparently contented; but there is a romance and a mystery here that many would like to unravel. Or, maybe, he enters the neat frame house of a broken-down Wall-street stockbroker, who with the remnants of his fortune hopes to retrieve himself upon his one hundred and sixty acre homestead, and who, with his refined and cultured family, makes an oasis in the desert for the tired missionary.

In the winter he sometimes rides a hundred miles to Conference, and time and again is upset as he attempts to pass through the immense drifts. His harness gives way when he is miles from a house; and he must patch it up as best he can from the other harness, and lead one horse. He must learn to ride a tricking broncho, to sleep out on the prairie, to cover himself with a snowdrift to keep from freezing, and in case of extremity to kill his horse and crawl inside, perhaps barely to escape with his life as the warm body changes into a refrigerator. If he lives in a sod house, he must often put the sheets above his head to keep away the lizards that crawl out as the weather becomes warm, and an occasional rattler waking up from his torpid winter sleep. At times the rains thaw his roof out, and it drops too; and then he must reshingle with sod.

Often he is called to go forty and fifty miles to visit the sick, to sit up with the dying, and to cheer their last moments. He can and does do more useful work when attending the poor and sickly than in any other way. Many a family has been won through the devotion of the minute-man to some poor little sufferer.

One day he meets a man hauling wood with a pair of wretched mules. The man is dressed in blue denim, the trousers are stuffed into boots that are full of holes. A great sombrero hat is on his head. By his side is a beautiful young woman. She is the wife. He finds on inquiry that the man has been a brilliant preacher, writer, and lecturer; yet here, two thousand miles from his Eastern home, he is hauling railway ties for a living.

I once visited a family living in a house so small that the kitchen would barely hold more than one person at a time. There was a sick man there, whom I used to call upon two and three times a week. In order to turn himself, he had a leather strap hung from the rafters. The woman of the house was of a cruel disposition. She was the second wife of the sick man's brother, and had a daughter who was about thirteen years of age, but who was large for her years. I used to find this child working about in her bare feet and singing, "I'm so glad that my Father in heaven." And I felt quite encouraged, as the child had a bad reputation.

One day this girl came to the parsonage and brought a silver napkin-ring, saying it was a New Year's gift, and that her mother was sorry she could not have engraved upon it "For my dear _pasture_." My wife said we ought not to take it; but I replied,--

"Yes; these people get fair wages, and would feel offended."

So we kept it. Some days after, as two men were felling a large pine-tree which was hollow at the base, they were surprised to see albums, bracelets, napkin-rings, combs, spoons, and other articles falling out. About this time a saleswoman had been missing just such things from her counter; and it was soon discovered that my youthful convert was a first-class kleptomaniac, equal to any city thief of the same class. Her mode of operation was to call the woman's attention to something on the shelf behind her; then taking anything within reach, and with an "Oh, how pretty!" she would decamp.

I met the mother on my way to visit the sick man. "O Elder!" she said, "I am in a peck of trouble. That gal of mine has cleared off on a raft with a lumberman, and she has been stealing too. What shall I do?"

As I knew that the woman had tied the girl's tongue with whip-cord, and beaten it with birch bark until it bled, to cure her of lying, I said, "You had better send her to the Reform School." It appeared afterward that the man who had run off with the girl was a minister's son; and he said in court he had taken pity on the girl, and wanted to save her from the cruelty of her mother. The girl was sent to the Reform School at Adrian, but not before she had given the sheriff the slip, and taken another girl with her, getting as far as Rochester, N. Y., before she was recaptured.

Sometimes in these frontier towns the sermon is stopped in a most unexpected way. I remember one good man preaching on Jacob. An old woman, who was sitting on the front bench, became deeply interested; and when the minister said, "When the morning came, Jacob, who had served all these long years for his wife, found not the beautiful Rachel, but the weak-eyed Leah," the old lady broke out with "Oh, my God, what a pity!" That ended the discourse, and the benediction was omitted.

In another back settlement a young student was preaching on the Prodigal Son. "And what, my friends, would you have done had your son come home in that way after such conduct?" The answer was prompt, "I would have shot the boy, and saved the calf."

IX.

THE SOUTH IN SPRINGTIME.

"You are going the wrong time of the year," was the reiterated warning of friends who heard that I was to make a Southern trip. Experience proved them to be as far astray as if they had warned one from going North in June; for the May of the South is the June of the North. Nature was revelling in her fullest dress, making a symphony in green,--all shades, from the pale tint of the chinquapin and persimmon, to the deep indigo of the long-leafed pine, and the tender purple green of the distant hills,--a perfect extravaganza of vegetable growth.

The weather was delicious; from the south and east came the ocean air, and from the north and west the balsam-laden ozone of the mountains, every turn in the road revealing new beauties. The cool Southern homes, with their wide verandas covered with honeysuckle, and great hallways running right through the house, often revealing some of the daintiest little pictures of light and shade, from apple or china tree varied with the holly, the Cape jasmine, and scuppernong vines, the latter often covering a half-acre of land, while chanticleer and his seraglio strutted in proud content, monarch of all he surveyed. High on a pole hung the hollowed gourds, homes for the martins and swallows. The mistress sat at her sewing in the shady porch, while out beyond, under a giant oak, with gracefully twined turban and brilliant dress, the sable washerwoman hung out her many-colored pieces, making altogether a scene of rural beauty seldom surpassed.

What joy to sit in the ample porch and look over the great cotton-fields with their regular rows of bluish green, variegated by the tender hue of the young corn, and a dozen shades of as many species of oak, while the brilliant tulip-tree and the distant hills, now of softest blue, contrasting with the rich, red ochre of the soil, make up a picture never to be forgotten. Cooled by the breezes that sweep through the porch, one dozes away an hour of enchantment. The negroes with their mules, in the distance, in almost every field, add to its piquancy, and often, floating on the wind, come wild snatches in weird minor notes the broken rhythm of their old Virginia reel, performed with the rollicking exuberance of the race.

The reader must not suppose that all Southern homes answer to the above description. Thousands of houses are without a porch or any shade save that which nature gives. The chimneys are built on the outside, sometimes of stone, sometimes of brick or of clay, while layers of one-inch slats hold the chimney together; but, as a rule, so prodigal is nature that a vine of some kind will entwine around their otherwise bare and severe outlines, and make them, like some dogs, homely enough to be handsome.

Although these poorer houses are devoid of all artificial attempts to beautify, they are frequently built near a great oak and the dense china-tree for shade, while wild fruits of many kinds grow promiscuously about. In every hedgerow, and within a stone's throw of nearly every country home, will be found partridges, wild pigeons, and all sorts of small game, with plenty of foxes to keep it in reasonable bounds, while every household has a number of hounds and curs for the foxes. But with all the varied beauty of the scene, the New Englander constantly misses the well-kept lawn,--for here bare ground always takes the place of grass,--and there are no village green and fine shaded roads, and that general neatness which distinguishes the rural scenes of "the Pilgrim land."

A few words about the people. They are as warm-hearted as their climate; the stranger is greeted with such invitations as these: "Come in;" "Take a chair;" "Have some of the fry;" "Have some fresh water." They are up with the sun--family prayer by five, A.M.; breakfast half an hour later; dinner at one; supper at seven; to bed by dark. The churches are plain, costing seldom more than eight hundred or one thousand dollars; doors on all sides opposite each other to allow for a good circulation of air. A pail of water stands on a form near the pulpit. The church generally stands in a grove or the forest itself.

The people are very fond of preaching. The whole family, from the oldest to the youngest, go; and one may often see the mother at the communion with a little one at the breast. Sometimes eleven or more of a family will occupy a wagon filled with oak-splint chairs.

It takes one back thirty years ago to the West, as one stands at the church-door and sees the people flocking in through winding roads in the woods, the sunlight and shadow dancing upon the moving teams that shine like satin in the bright morning air. The dogs are wild with delight as they start a covey of partridges, and make music in the deep shadows of the woods. Here a group of young men and maidens are drinking at the spring.

The preacher often is a jack-of-all-trades--sometimes a doctor, getting his degree from the family medicine-book; and strange to say, though an ardent believer in faith-cure, and with marvellous accounts of cures in answer to prayer, yet prescribing a liver invigorator when that organ is in trouble. Some of these men are natural orators, and with their bursts of eloquence often hush their hearers to holy awe and inspiration. They have one book, and believe it. No doubts trouble them. Higher criticism has never reached them. Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch is unquestioned. Moses and no other, to them, wrote the five books, including the account of his own burial. They know nothing of pre-exilic Psalms or Greek periods of Daniel; but all preach Jesus, no matter whence they draw their text. In an instant they make a short cut for Calvary.

One brother, over eighty years of age, walks fifteen miles, and preaches three times. Some of his sermons take two hours in delivery, without the aid of a scrap of note; and the talk for days after is on the sermon. No quarterlies, monthlies, or weeklies lie at home to divert. No lecturer strays to that region. Here and there is a village house with an organ or a piano, and, of course, a paper.

I am speaking of the rural South,--and nearly all the South is rural, nearly all American, even the cities, with few exceptions, and the operatives are Southern, and mostly from the farms; so that one may find a city whose operatives live in another State, across a river, in a community numbering nearly seven thousand souls, and most of them keeping pigs and a cow (or, rather, not keeping them, for they roam at their own sweet will down grassy, ungraded streets). In such a place one meets old ladies of quite respectable appearance, with the little snuffing-stick in their mouths, or a pipe; and here one small grocery shop may sell two hundred dozen of little tin snuff-boxes in a month! There are cities in the South where you will find as fine hotels and stores as any on the continent. But from any such city it is only a step to the most primitive conditions.

Let me describe a characteristic night scene near a large city. My friend met me at the depot with his little light wagon and diminutive mule, and we started for the homestead. Our road lay between banks of honeysuckle that saturated the air with its rich perfume; wild-goose plum, persimmon, bullice, and chinquapin (the latter somewhat like a chestnut, but smaller), huckleberries on bushes twelve feet high, called currants there, lined the road on either side. The house was surrounded by the _débris_ of former corn-cribs and present ones; stables were scattered here and there in picturesque confusion. One end of the house was open, and had been waiting for years for its chimney; there was shrubbery of every kind all about. I had the usual hearty welcome and supper, and then attended the inevitable meeting in the grove.