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The Story of a Pioneer

by Anna Howard Shaw · English · Gutenberg #354 · 502,084 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Story of a Pioneer

Author: Anna Howard Shaw
        Elizabeth Garver Jordan


        
Release date: November 1, 1995 [eBook #354]
                Most recently updated: July 13, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/354

Credits: Produced by Mike Lough, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF A PIONEER ***




Produced by Mike Lough





THE STORY OF A PIONEER

By Anna Howard Shaw, D.D., M.D.

With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan


TO THE WOMEN PIONEERS OF AMERICA

           They cut a path through tangled underwood
           Of old traditions, out to broader ways.
           They lived to here their work called brave and good,
           But oh! the thorns before the crown of bays.
           The world gives lashes to its Pioneers
           Until the goal is reached--then deafening cheers.

                          Adapted by ANNA HOWARD SHAW.




CONTENTS


I. FIRST MEMORIES

II. IN THE WILDERNESS

III. HIGH-SCHOOL AND COLLEGE DAYS

IV. THE WOLF AT THE DOOR

V. SHEPHERD OF A DIVIDED FLOCK

VI. CAPE COD MEMORIES

VII. THE GREAT CAUSE

VIII. DRAMA IN THE LECTURE FIELD

IX. "AUNT SUSAN"

X. THE PASSING OF "AUNT SUSAN"

XI. THE WIDENING SUFFRAGE STREAM

XII. BUILDING A HOME

XIII. PRESIDENT OF "THE NATIONAL"

XIV. RECENT CAMPAIGNS

XV. CONVENTION INCIDENTS

XVI. COUNCIL EPISODES

XVII. VALE!



ILLUSTRATIONS

REVEREND ANNA HOWARD SHAW IN HER PULPIT ROBES

LOCH-AN-EILAN CASTLE

DR SHAW'S MOTHER, NICOLAS SHAW, AT SEVENTEEN

ALNWICK CASTLE

DR. SHAW AT THIRTY-TWO

DR. SHAW AT FIFTY

DR. SHAW AND "HER BABY"--THE DAUGHTER OF RACHEL FOSTER AVERY

DR. SHAW'S MOTHER AT EIGHTY

DR. SHAW'S FATHER AT EIGHTY

DR. SHAW'S SISTER MARY, WHO DIED IN 1883

LUCY E. ANTHONY, DR. SHAW S FRIEND AND "AUNT SUSAN'S"
FAVORITE NIECE

THE WOOD ROAD NEAR DR. SHAW'S CAPE COD HOME, THE HAVEN

DR. SHAW'S COTTAGE, THE HAVEN, AT WIANNO, CAPE
COD--THE FIRST HOME SHE BUILT

GATE ENTRANCE TO DR. SHAW'S HOME AT MOYLAN

THE SECOND HOUSE THAT DR. SHAW BUILT

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

MISS MARY GARRETT, THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND OF MISS THOMAS

MISS M. CAREY THOMAS, PRESIDENT OF BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON

CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT

LUCY STONE

MARY A. LIVERMORE

FOUR PIONEERS IN THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

FIREPLACE IN THE LIVING-ROOM, SHOWING AUNT
SUSAN'S" CHAIR

HALLWAY IN DR. SHAW'S HOME AT MOYLAN

DR. SHAW'S HOME (ALNWICK LODGE) AND HER TWO OAKS

THE VERANDA AT ALNWICK LODGE

SACCAWAGEA

ALNWICK LODGE, DR. SHAW'S HOME

THE ROCK-BORDERED BROOK WHICH DR. SHAW LOVES





THE STORY OF A PIONEER




I. FIRST MEMORIES

My father's ancestors were the Shaws of Rothiemurchus, in Scotland,
and the ruins of their castle may still be seen on the island of
Loch-an-Eilan, in the northern Highlands. It was never the picturesque
castle of song and story, this home of the fighting Shaws, but an
austere fortress, probably built in Roman times; and even to-day the
crumbling walls which alone are left of it show traces of the relentless
assaults upon them. Of these the last and the most successful were made
in the seventeenth century by the Grants and Rob Roy; and it was into
the hands of the Grants that the Shaw fortress finally fell, about 1700,
after almost a hundred years of ceaseless warfare.

It gives me no pleasure to read the grisly details of their struggles,
but I confess to a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that my
ancestors made a good showing in the defense of what was theirs. Beyond
doubt they were brave fighters and strong men. There were other sides to
their natures, however, which the high lights of history throw up
less appealingly. As an instance, we have in the family chronicles the
blood-stained page of Allen Shaw, the oldest son of the last Lady Shaw
who lived in the fortress. It appears that when the father of this
young man died, about 1560, his mother married again, to the intense
disapproval of her son. For some time after the marriage he made no open
revolt against the new-comer in the domestic circle; but finally, on the
pretext that his dog had been attacked by his stepfather, he forced a
quarrel with the older man and the two fought a duel with swords, after
which the victorious Allen showed a sad lack of chivalry. He not only
killed his stepfather, but he cut off that gentleman's head and bore it
to his mother in her bedchamber--an action which was considered, even in
that tolerant age, to be carrying filial resentment too far.

Probably Allen regretted it. Certainly he paid a high penalty for it,
and his clan suffered with him. He was outlawed and fled, only to be
hunted down for months, and finally captured and executed by one of the
Grants, who, in further virtuous disapproval of Allen's act, seized and
held the Shaw stronghold. The other Shaws of the clan fought long and
ably for its recovery, but though they were helped by their kinsmen, the
Mackintoshes, and though good Scotch blood dyed the gray walls of the
fortress for many generations, the castle never again came into the
hands of the Shaws. It still entails certain obligations for the Grants,
however, and one of these is to give the King of England a snowball
whenever he visits Loch-an-Eilan!

As the years passed the Shaw clan scattered. Many Shaws are still to be
found in the Mackintosh country and throughout southern Scotland. Others
went to England, and it was from this latter branch that my father
sprang. His name was Thomas Shaw, and he was the younger son of a
gentleman--a word which in those days seemed to define a man who devoted
his time largely to gambling and horse-racing. My grandfather, like his
father before him, was true to the traditions of his time and class.
Quite naturally and simply he squandered all he had, and died abruptly,
leaving his wife and two sons penniless. They were not, however, a
helpless band. They, too, had their traditions, handed down by the
fighting Shaws. Peter, the older son, became a soldier, and died bravely
in the Crimean War. My father, through some outside influence, turned
his attention to trade, learning to stain and emboss wallpaper by hand,
and developing this work until he became the recognized expert in
his field. Indeed, he progressed until he himself checked his rise by
inventing a machine that made his handwork unnecessary. His employer at
once claimed and utilized this invention, to which, by the laws of those
days, he was entitled, and thus the cornerstone on which my father had
expected to build a fortune proved the rock on which his career was
wrecked. But that was years later, in America, and many other things had
happened first.

For one, he had temporarily dropped his trade and gone into the
flour-and-grain business; and, for another, he had married my mother.
She was the daughter of a Scotch couple who had come to England and
settled in Alnwick, in Northumberland County. Her father, James Stott,
was the driver of the royal-mail stage between Alnwick and Newcastle,
and his accidental death while he was still a young man left my
grandmother and her eight children almost destitute. She was immediately
given a position in the castle of the Duke of Northumberland, and
her sons were educated in the duke's school, while her daughters were
entered in the school of the duchess.

My thoughts dwell lovingly on this grandmother, Nicolas Grant Stott, for
she was a remarkable woman, with a dauntless soul and progressive ideas
far in advance of her time. She was one of the first Unitarians in
England, and years before any thought of woman suffrage entered the
minds of her country-women she refused to pay tithes to the support of
the Church of England--an action which precipitated a long-drawn-out
conflict between her and the law. In those days it was customary to
assess tithes on every pane of glass in a window, and a portion of the
money thus collected went to the support of the Church. Year after year
my intrepid grandmother refused to pay these assessments, and year after
year she sat pensively upon her door-step, watching articles of her
furniture being sold for money to pay her tithes. It must have been
an impressive picture, and it was one with which the community became
thoroughly familiar, as the determined old lady never won her fight and
never abandoned it. She had at least the comfort of public sympathy, for
she was by far the most popular woman in the countryside. Her neighbors
admired her courage; perhaps they appreciated still more what she did
for them, for she spent all her leisure in the homes of the very poor,
mending their clothing and teaching them to sew. Also, she left behind
her a path of cleanliness as definite as the line of foam that follows
a ship; for it soon became known among her protegees that Nicolas Stott
was as much opposed to dirt as she was to the payment of tithes.

She kept her children in the schools of the duke and duchess until they
had completed the entire course open to them. A hundred times, and among
many new scenes and strange people, I have heard my mother describe her
own experiences as a pupil. All the children of the dependents of the
castle were expected to leave school at fourteen years of age. During
their course they were not allowed to study geography, because, in the
sage opinion of their elders, knowledge of foreign lands might make
them discontented and inclined to wander. Neither was composition
encouraged--that might lead to the writing of love-notes! But they were
permitted to absorb all the reading and arithmetic their little brains
could hold, while the art of sewing was not only encouraged, but
proficiency in it was stimulated by the award of prizes. My mother,
being a rather precocious young person, graduated at thirteen and
carried off the first prize. The garment she made was a linen chemise
for the duchess, and the little needlewoman had embroidered on it, with
her own hair, the august lady's coat of arms. The offering must have
been appreciated, for my mother's story always ended with the same
words, uttered with the same air of gentle pride, "And the duchess
gave me with her own hands my Bible and my mug of beer!" She never saw
anything amusing in this association of gifts, and I always stood behind
her when she told the incident, that she might not see the disrespectful
mirth it aroused in me.

My father and mother met in Alnwick, and were married in February, 1835.
Ten years after his marriage father was forced into bankruptcy by the
passage of the corn law, and to meet the obligations attending
his failure he and my mother sold practically everything they
possessed--their home, even their furniture. Their little sons, who were
away at school, were brought home, and the family expenses were cut down
to the barest margin; but all these sacrifices paid only part of the
debts. My mother, finding that her early gift had a market value, took
in sewing. Father went to work on a small salary, and both my parents
saved every penny they could lay aside, with the desperate determination
to pay their remaining debts. It was a long struggle and a painful one,
but they finally won it. Before they had done so, however, and during
their bleakest days, their baby died, and my mother, like her mother
before her, paid the penalty of being outside the fold of the Church of
England. She, too, was a Unitarian, and her baby, therefore, could not
be laid in any consecrated burial-ground in her neighborhood. She had
either to bury it in the Potter's Field, with criminals, suicides, and
paupers, or to take it by stage-coach to Alnwick, twenty miles away, and
leave it in the little Unitarian churchyard where, after her strenuous
life, Nicolas Stott now lay in peace. She made the dreary journey alone,
with the dear burden across her lap.

In 1846, my parents went to London. There they did not linger long,
for the big, indifferent city had nothing to offer them. They moved
to Newcastle-on-Tyne, and here I was born, on the fourteenth day of
February, in 1847. Three boys and two girls had preceded me in the
family circle, and when I was two years old my younger sister came. We
were little better off in Newcastle than in London, and now my father
began to dream the great dream of those days. He would go to America.
Surely, he felt, in that land of infinite promise all would be well with
him and his. He waited for the final payment of his debts and for my
younger sister's birth. Then he bade us good-by and sailed away to make
an American home for us; and in the spring of 1851 my mother followed
him with her six children, starting from Liverpool in a sailing-vessel,
the John Jacob Westervelt.

I was then little more than four years old, and the first vivid memory
I have is that of being on shipboard and having a mighty wave roll
over me. I was lying on what seemed to be an enormous red box under a
hatchway, and the water poured from above, almost drowning me. This was
the beginning of a storm which raged for days, and I still have of it a
confused memory, a sort of nightmare, in which strange horrors figure,
and which to this day haunts me at intervals when I am on the sea. The
thing that stands out most strongly during that period is the white face
of my mother, ill in her berth. We were with five hundred emigrants on
the lowest deck of the ship but one, and as the storm grew wilder an
unreasoning terror filled our fellow-passengers. Too ill to protect her
helpless brood, my mother saw us carried away from her for hours at a
time, on the crests of waves of panic that sometimes approached her
and sometimes receded, as they swept through the black hole in which
we found ourselves when the hatches were nailed down. No madhouse, I am
sure, could throw more hideous pictures on the screen of life than
those which met our childish eyes during the appalling three days of the
storm. Our one comfort was the knowledge that our mother was not afraid.
She was desperately ill, but when we were able to reach her, to cling
close to her for a blessed interval, she was still the sure refuge she
had always been.

On the second day the masts went down, and on the third day the disabled
ship, which now had sprung a leak and was rolling helplessly in the
trough of the sea, was rescued by another ship and towed back to
Queenstown, the nearest port. The passengers, relieved of their
anxieties, went from their extreme of fear to an equal extreme of
drunken celebration. They laughed, sang, and danced, but when we reached
the shore many of them returned to the homes they had left, declaring
that they had had enough of the ocean. We, however, remained on the ship
until she was repaired, and then sailed on her again. We were too poor
to return home; indeed, we had no home to which we could return. We were
even too poor to live ashore. But we made some penny excursions in the
little boats that plied back and forth, and to us children at least
the weeks of waiting were not without interest. Among other places we
visited Spike Island, where the convicts were, and for hours we watched
the dreary shuttle of labor swing back and forth as the convicts carried
pails of water from one side of the island, only to empty them into the
sea at the other side. It was merely "busy work," to keep them occupied
at hard labor; but even then I must have felt some dim sense of the
irony of it, for I have remembered it vividly all these years.

Our second voyage on the John Jacob Westervelt was a very different
experience from the first. By day a glorious sun shone overhead; by
night we had the moon and stars, as well as the racing waves we never
wearied of watching. For some reason, probably because of my intense
admiration for them, which I showed with unmaidenly frankness, I became
the special pet of the sailors. They taught me to sing their songs
as they hauled on their ropes, and I recall, as if I had learned it
yesterday, one pleasing ditty:

     Haul on the bow-line,
     Kitty is my darling,
     Haul on the bow-line,
     The bow-line--HAUL!

When I sang "haul" all the sailors pulled their hardest, and I had
an exhilarating sense of sharing in their labors. As a return for my
service of song the men kept my little apron full of ship sugar--very
black stuff and probably very bad for me; but I ate an astonishing
amount of it during that voyage, and, so far as I remember, felt no ill
effects.

The next thing I recall is being seriously scalded. I was at the foot
of a ladder up which a sailor was carrying a great pot of hot coffee. He
slipped, and the boiling liquid poured down on me. I must have had some
bad days after that, for I was terribly burned, but they are mercifully
vague. My next vivid impression is of seeing land, which we sighted at
sunset, and I remember very distinctly just how it looked. It has never
looked the same since. The western sky was a mass of crimson and gold
clouds, which took on the shapes of strange and beautiful things. To
me it seemed that we were entering heaven. I remember also the doctors
coming on board to examine us, and I can still see a line of big
Irishmen standing very straight and holding out their tongues for
inspection. To a little girl only four years old their huge, open mouths
looked appalling.

On landing a grievous disappointment awaited us; my father did not
meet us. He was in New Bedford, Massachusetts, nursing his grief and
preparing to return to England, for he had been told that the John Jacob
Westervelt had been lost at sea with every soul on board. One of the
missionaries who met the ship took us under his wing and conducted us
to a little hotel, where we remained until father had received his
incredible news and rushed to New York. He could hardly believe that
we were really restored to him; and even now, through the mists of more
than half a century, I can still see the expression in his wet eyes as
he picked me up and tossed me into the air.

I can see, too, the toys he brought me--a little saw and a hatchet,
which became the dearest treasures of my childish days. They were
fatidical gifts, that saw and hatchet; in the years ahead of me I was to
use tools as well as my brothers did, as I proved when I helped to build
our frontier home.

We went to New Bedford with father, who had found work there at his old
trade; and here I laid the foundations of my first childhood friendship,
not with another child, but with my next-door neighbor, a ship-builder.
Morning after morning this man swung me on his big shoulder and took
me to his shipyard, where my hatchet and saw had violent exercise as I
imitated the workers around me. Discovering that my tiny petticoats were
in my way, my new friend had a little boy's suit made for me; and thus
emancipated, at this tender age, I worked unwearyingly at his side all
day long and day after day. No doubt it was due to him that I did not
casually saw off a few of my toes and fingers. Certainly I smashed them
often enough with blows of my dull but active hatchet. I was very, very
busy; and I have always maintained that I began to earn my share of the
family's living at the age of five--for in return for the delights of my
society, which seemed never to pall upon him, my new friend allowed my
brothers to carry home from the shipyard all the wood my mother could
use.

We remained in New Bedford less than a year, for in the spring of
1852 my father made another change, taking his family to Lawrence,
Massachusetts, where we lived until 1859. The years in Lawrence were
interesting and formative ones. At the tender age of nine and ten I
became interested in the Abolition movement. We were Unitarians, and
General Oliver and many of the prominent citizens of Lawrence belonged
to the Unitarian Church. We knew Robert Shaw, who led the first negro
regiment, and Judge Storrow, one of the leading New England judges of
his time, as well as the Cabots and George A. Walton, who was the author
of Walton's Arithmetic and head of the Lawrence schools. Outbursts of
war talk thrilled me, and occasionally I had a little adventure of my
own, as when one day, in visiting our cellar, I heard a noise in the
coal-bin. I investigated and discovered a negro woman concealed there.
I had been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as listening to the
conversation of my elders, so I was vastly stirred over the negro
question. I raced up-stairs in a condition of awe-struck and quivering
excitement, which my mother promptly suppressed by sending me to bed. No
doubt she questioned my youthful discretion, for she almost convinced
me that I had seen nothing at all--almost, but not quite; and she wisely
kept me close to her for several days, until the escaped slave my father
was hiding was safely out of the house and away. Discovery of this
serious offense might have borne grave results for him.

It was in Lawrence, too, that I received and spent my first twenty-five
cents. I used an entire day in doing this, and the occasion was one of
the most delightful and memorable of my life. It was the Fourth of July,
and I was dressed in white and rode in a procession. My sister Mary, who
also graced the procession, had also been given twenty-five cents; and
during the parade, when, for obvious reasons, we were unable to break
ranks and spend our wealth, the consciousness of it lay heavily upon
us. When we finally began our shopping the first place we visited was a
candy store, and I recall distinctly that we forced the weary proprietor
to take down and show us every jar in the place before we spent one
penny. The first banana I ever ate was purchased that day, and I
hesitated over it a long time. Its cost was five cents, and in view of
that large expenditure, the eating of the fruit, I was afraid, would be
too brief a joy. I bought it, however, and the experience developed into
a tragedy, for, not knowing enough to peel the banana, I bit through
skin and pulp alike, as if I were eating an apple, and then burst into
ears of disappointment. The beautiful conduct of my sister Mary shines
down through the years. She, wise child, had taken no chances with the
unknown; but now, moved by my despair, she bought half of my banana,
and we divided the fruit, the loss, and the lesson. Fate, moreover, had
another turn of the screw for us, for, after Mary had taken a bite of
it, we gave what was left of the banana to a boy who stood near us and
who knew how to eat it; and not even the large amount of candy in our
sticky hands enabled us to regard with calmness the subsequent happiness
of that little boy.

Another experience with fruit in Lawrence illustrates the ideas of my
mother and the character of the training she gave her children. Our
neighbors, the Cabots, were one day giving a great garden party, and
my sister was helping to pick strawberries for the occasion. When I was
going home from school I passed the berry-patches and stopped to speak
to my sister, who at once presented me with two strawberries. She said
Mrs. Cabot had told her to eat all she wanted, but that she would eat
two less than she wanted and give those two to me. To my mind, the
suggestion was generous and proper; in my life strawberries were rare.
I ate one berry, and then, overcome by an ambition to be generous also,
took the other berry home to my mother, telling her how I had got it. To
my chagrin, mother was deeply shocked. She told me that the transaction
was all wrong, and she made me take back the berry and explain the
matter to Mrs. Cabot. By the time I reached that generous lady the berry
was the worse for its journey, and so was I. I was only nine years old
and very sensitive. It was clear to me that I could hardly live through
the humiliation of the confession, and it was indeed a bitter experience
the worst, I think, in my young life, though Mrs. Cabot was both
sympathetic and understanding. She kissed me, and sent a quart of
strawberries to my mother; but for a long time afterward I could not
meet her kind eyes, for I believed that in her heart she thought me a
thief.

My second friendship, and one which had a strong influence on my
after-life, was formed in Lawrence. I was not more than ten years old
when I met this new friend, but the memory of her in after-years, and
the impression she had made on my susceptible young mind, led me first
into the ministry, next into medicine, and finally into suffrage-work.
Living next door to us, on Prospect Hill, was a beautiful and mysterious
woman. All we children knew of her was that she was a vivid and romantic
figure, who seemed to have no friends and of whom our elders spoke in
whispers or not at all. To me she was a princess in a fairy-tale, for
she rode a white horse and wore a blue velvet riding-habit with a blue
velvet hat and a picturesquely drooping white plume. I soon learned at
what hours she went forth to ride, and I used to hover around our gate
for the joy of seeing her mount and gallop away. I realized that there
was something unusual about her house, and I had an idea that the prince
was waiting for her somewhere in the far distance, and that for the time
at least she had escaped the ogre in the castle she left behind. I was
wrong about the prince, but right about the ogre. It was only when my
unhappy lady left her castle that she was free.

Very soon she noticed me. Possibly she saw the adoration in my childish
eyes. She began to nod and smile at me, and then to speak to me, but at
first I was almost afraid to answer her. There were stories now among
the children that the house was haunted, and that by night a ghost
walked there and in the grounds. I felt an extraordinary interest in
the ghost, and I spent hours peering through our picket fence, trying
to catch a glimpse of it; but I hesitated to be on terms of neighborly
intimacy with one who dwelt with ghosts.

One day the mysterious lady bent and kissed me. Then, straightening up,
she looked at me queerly and said: "Go and tell your mother I did that."
There was something very compelling in her manner. I knew at once that I
must tell my mother what she had done, and I ran into our house and did
so. While my mother was considering the problem the situation presented,
for she knew the character of the house next door, a note was handed in
to her--a very pathetic little note from my mysterious lady, asking my
mother to let me come and see her. Long afterward mother showed it to
me. It ended with the words: "She will see no one but me. No harm shall
come to her. Trust me."

That night my parents talked the matter over and decided to let me go.
Probably they felt that the slave next door was as much to be pitied as
the escaped-negro slaves they so often harbored in our home. I made my
visit, which was the first of many, and a strange friendship began and
developed between the woman of the town and the little girl she loved.
Some of those visits I remember as vividly as if I had made them
yesterday. There was never the slightest suggestion during any of them
of things I should not see or hear, for while I was with her my hostess
became a child again, and we played together like children. She had
wonderful toys for me, and pictures and books; but the thing I loved
best of all and played with for hours was a little stuffed hen which she
told me had been her dearest treasure when she was a child at home. She
had also a stuffed puppy, and she once mentioned that those two things
alone were left of her life as a little girl. Besides the toys and books
and pictures, she gave me ice-cream and cake, and told me fairy-tales.
She had a wonderful understanding of what a child likes. There were half
a dozen women in the house with her, but I saw none of them nor any of
the men who came.

Once, when we had become very good friends indeed and my early shyness
had departed, I found courage to ask her where the ghost was--the ghost
that haunted her house. I can still see the look in her eyes as they
met mine. She told me the ghost lived in her heart, and that she did
not like to talk about it, and that we must not speak of it again. After
that I never mentioned it, but I was more deeply interested than ever,
for a ghost that lived in a heart was a new kind of ghost to me at
that time, though I have met many of them since then. During all our
intercourse my mother never entered the house next door, nor did my
mysterious lady enter our home; but she constantly sent my mother secret
gifts for the poor and the sick of the neighborhood, and she was always
the first to offer help for those who were in trouble. Many years
afterward mother told me she was the most generous woman she had ever
known, and that she had a rarely beautiful nature. Our departure for
Michigan broke up the friendship, but I have never forgotten her; and
whenever, in my later work as minister, physician, and suffragist, I
have been able to help women of the class to which she belonged, I have
mentally offered that help for credit in the tragic ledger of her life,
in which the clean and the blotted pages were so strange a contrast.

One more incident of Lawrence I must describe before I leave that city
behind me, as we left it for ever in 1859. While we were still there
a number of Lawrence men decided to go West, and amid great public
excitement they departed in a body for Kansas, where they founded the
town of Lawrence in that state. I recall distinctly the public interest
which attended their going, and the feeling every one seemed to have
that they were passing forever out of the civilized world. Their
farewells to their friends were eternal; no one expected to see them
again, and my small brain grew dizzy as I tried to imagine a place so
remote as their destination. It was, I finally decided, at the
uttermost ends of the earth, and it seemed quite possible that the brave
adventurers who reached it might then drop off into space. Fifty years
later I was talking to a California girl who complained lightly of the
monotony of a climate where the sun shone and the flowers bloomed all
the year around. "But I had a delightful change last year," she added,
with animation. "I went East for the winter."

"To New York?" I asked.

"No," corrected the California girl, easily, "to Lawrence, Kansas."

Nothing, I think, has ever made me feel quite so old as that remark.
That in my life, not yet, to me at least, a long one, I should see such
an arc described seemed actually oppressive until I realized that,
after all, the arc was merely a rainbow of time showing how gloriously
realized were the hopes of the Lawrence pioneers.

The move to Michigan meant a complete upheaval in our lives. In Lawrence
we had around us the fine flower of New England civilization. We
children went to school; our parents, though they were in very humble
circumstances, were associated with the leading spirits and the
big movements of the day. When we went to Michigan we went to the
wilderness, to the wild pioneer life of those times, and we were all old
enough to keenly feel the change.

My father was one of a number of Englishmen who took up tracts in the
northern forests of Michigan, with the old dream of establishing a
colony there. None of these men had the least practical knowledge
of farming. They were city men or followers of trades which had
no connection with farm life. They went straight into the thick
timber-land, instead of going to the rich and waiting prairies, and they
crowned this initial mistake by cutting down the splendid timber instead
of letting it stand. Thus bird's-eye maple and other beautiful woods
were used as fire-wood and in the construction of rude cabins, and the
greatest asset of the pioneers was ignored.

Father preceded us to the Michigan woods, and there, with his oldest
son, James, took up a claim. They cleared a space in the wilderness just
large enough for a log cabin, and put up the bare walls of the cabin
itself. Then father returned to Lawrence and his work, leaving James
behind. A few months later (this was in 1859), my mother, my two
sisters, Eleanor and Mary, my youngest brother, Henry, eight years of
age, and I, then twelve, went to Michigan to work on and hold down the
claim while father, for eighteen months longer, stayed on in Lawrence,
sending us such remittances as he could. His second and third sons, John
and Thomas, remained in the East with him.

Every detail of our journey through the wilderness is clear in my mind.
At that time the railroad terminated at Grand Rapids, Michigan, and
we covered the remaining distance--about one hundred miles--by wagon,
riding through a dense and often trackless forest. My brother James met
us at Grand Rapids with what, in those days, was called a lumber-wagon,
but which had a horrible resemblance to a vehicle from the health
department. My sisters and I gave it one cold look and turned from
it; we were so pained by its appearance that we refused to ride in it
through the town. Instead, we started off on foot, trying to look as if
we had no association with it, and we climbed into the unwieldy vehicle
only when the city streets were far behind us. Every available inch of
space in the wagon was filled with bedding and provisions. As yet we
had no furniture; we were to make that for ourselves when we reached
our cabin; and there was so little room for us to ride that we children
walked by turns, while James, from the beginning of the journey to its
end, seven days later, led our weary horses.

To my mother, who was never strong, the whole experience must have been
a nightmare of suffering and stoical endurance. For us children there
were compensations. The expedition took on the character of a high
adventure, in which we sometimes had shelter and sometimes failed
to find it, sometimes were fed, but often went hungry. We forded
innumerable streams, the wheels of the heavy wagon sinking so deeply
into the stream-beds that we often had to empty our load before we could
get them out again. Fallen trees lay across our paths, rivers caused
long detours, while again and again we lost our way or were turned aside
by impenetrable forest tangles.

Our first day's journey covered less than eight miles, and that night we
stopped at a farm-house which was the last bit of civilization we saw.
Early the next morning we were off again, making the slow progress due
to the rough roads and our heavy load. At night we stopped at a place
called Thomas's Inn, only to be told by the woman who kept it that
there was nothing in the house to eat. Her husband, she said, had gone
"outside" (to Grand Rapids) to get some flour, and had not returned--but
she added that we could spend the night, if we chose, and enjoy shelter,
if not food. We had provisions in our wagon, so we wearily entered,
after my brother had got out some of our pork and opened a barrel of
flour. With this help the woman made some biscuits, which were so green
that my poor mother could not eat them. She had admitted to us that
the one thing she had in the house was saleratus, and she had used this
ingredient with an unsparing hand. When the meal was eaten she broke the
further news that there were no beds.

"The old woman can sleep with me," she suggested, "and the girls can
sleep on the floor. The boys will have to go to the barn." She and her
bed were not especially attractive, and mother decided to lie on the
floor with us. We had taken our bedding from the wagon, and we slept
very well; but though she was usually superior to small annoyances, I
think my mother resented being called an "old woman." She must have felt
like one that night, but she was only about forty-eight years of age.

At dawn the next morning we resumed our journey, and every day after
that we were able to cover the distance demanded by the schedule
arranged before we started. This meant that some sort of shelter usually
awaited us at night. But one day we knew there would be no houses
between the place we left in the morning and that where we were to
sleep. The distance was about twenty miles, and when twilight fell we
had not made it. In the back of the wagon my mother had a box of little
pigs, and during the afternoon these had broken loose and escaped
into the woods. We had lost much time in finding them, and we were so
exhausted that when we came to a hut made of twigs and boughs we decided
to camp in it for the night, though we knew nothing about it. My brother
had unharnessed the horses, and my mother and sister were cooking
dough-god--a mixture of flour, water, and soda, fried in a pan-when two
men rode up on horseback and called my brother to one side. Immediately
after the talk which followed James harnessed his horses again and
forced us to go on, though by that time darkness had fallen. He told
mother, but did not tell us children until long afterward, that a man
had been murdered in the hut only the night before. The murderer was
still at large in the woods, and the new-comers were members of a posse
who were searching for him. My brother needed no urging to put as many
miles as he could between us and the sinister spot.

In that fashion we made our way to our new home. The last day, like the
first, we traveled only eight miles, but we spent the night in a house
I shall never forget. It was beautifully clean, and for our evening meal
its mistress brought out loaves of bread which were the largest we had
ever seen. She cut great slices of this bread for us and spread maple
sugar on them, and it seemed to us that never before had anything tasted
so good.

The next morning we made the last stage of our journey, our hearts
filled with the joy of nearing our new home. We all had an idea that we
were going to a farm, and we expected some resemblance at least to the
prosperous farms we had seen in New England. My mother's mental picture
was, naturally, of an English farm. Possibly she had visions of red
barns and deep meadows, sunny skies and daisies. What we found awaiting
us were the four walls and the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing
in a small cleared strip of the wilderness, its doors and windows
represented by square holes, its floor also a thing of the future, its
whole effect achingly forlorn and desolate. It was late in the afternoon
when we drove up to the opening that was its front entrance, and I shall
never forget the look my mother turned upon the place. Without a word
she crossed its threshold, and, standing very still, looked slowly
around her. Then something within her seemed to give way, and she sank
upon the ground. She could not realize even then, I think, that this was
really the place father had prepared for us, that here he expected us to
live. When she finally took it in she buried her face in her hands, and
in that way she sat for hours without moving or speaking. For the first
time in her life she had forgotten us; and we, for our part, dared not
speak to her. We stood around her in a frightened group, talking to one
another in whispers. Our little world had crumbled under our feet. Never
before had we seen our mother give way to despair.

Night began to fall. The woods became alive with night creatures, and
the most harmless made the most noise. The owls began to hoot, and
soon we heard the wildcat, whose cry--a screech like that of a lost and
panic-stricken child--is one of the most appalling sounds of the forest.
Later the wolves added their howls to the uproar, but though darkness
came and we children whimpered around her, our mother still sat in her
strange lethargy.

At last my brother brought the horses close to the cabin and built fires
to protect them and us. He was only twenty, but he showed himself a man
during those early pioneer days. While he was picketing the horses and
building his protecting fires my mother came to herself, but her face
when she raised it was worse than her silence had been. She seemed to
have died and to have returned to us from the grave, and I am sure she
felt that she had done so. From that moment she took up again the burden
of her life, a burden she did not lay down until she passed away; but
her face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life
had cut upon it.

That night we slept on boughs spread on the earth inside the cabin
walls, and we put blankets before the holes which represented our doors
and windows, and kept our watch-fires burning. Soon the other children
fell asleep, but there was no sleep for me. I was only twelve years old,
but my mind was full of fancies. Behind our blankets, swaying in the
night wind, I thought I saw the heads and pushing shoulders of animals
and heard their padded footfalls. Later years brought familiarity with
wild things, and with worse things than they. But to-night that which I
most feared was within, not outside of, the cabin. In some way which I
did not understand the one sure refuge in our new world had been taken
from us. I hardly knew the silent woman who lay near me, tossing from
side to side and staring into the darkness; I felt that we had lost our
mother.




II. IN THE WILDERNESS

Like most men, my dear father should never have married. Though his
nature was one of the sweetest I have ever known, and though he would
at any call give his time to or risk his life for others, in practical
matters he remained to the end of his days as irresponsible as a child.
If his mind turned to practical details at all, it was solely in their
bearing toward great developments of the future. To him an acorn was not
an acorn, but a forest of young oaks.

Thus, when he took up his claim of three hundred and sixty acres of
land in the wilderness of northern Michigan, and sent my mother and
five young children to live there alone until he could join us eighteen
months later, he gave no thought to the manner in which we were to make
the struggle and survive the hardships before us. He had furnished us
with land and the four walls of a log cabin. Some day, he reasoned, the
place would be a fine estate, which his sons would inherit and in
the course of time pass on to their sons--always an Englishman's most
iridescent dream. That for the present we were one hundred miles from
a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen
miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats; that we
were wholly unlearned in the ways of the woods as well as in the most
primitive methods of farming; that we lacked not only every comfort, but
even the bare necessities of life; and that we must begin, single-handed
and untaught, a struggle for existence in which some of the severest
forces of nature would be arrayed against us--these facts had no weight
in my father's mind. Even if he had witnessed my mother's despair on the
night of our arrival in our new home, he would not have understood it.
From his viewpoint, he was doing a man's duty. He was working steadily
in Lawrence, and, incidentally, giving much time to the Abolition cause
and to other big public movements of his day which had his interest and
sympathy. He wrote to us regularly and sent us occasional remittances,
as well as a generous supply of improving literature for our minds.
It remained for us to strengthen our bodies, to meet the conditions in
which he had placed us, and to survive if we could.

We faced our situation with clear and unalarmed eyes the morning after
our arrival. The problem of food, we knew, was at least temporarily
solved. We had brought with us enough coffee, pork, and flour to last
for several weeks; and the one necessity father had put inside the cabin
walls was a great fireplace, made of mud and stones, in which our food
could be cooked. The problem of our water-supply was less simple, but
my brother James solved it for the time by showing us a creek a long
distance from the house; and for months we carried from this creek, in
pails, every drop of water we used, save that which we caught in troughs
when the rain fell.

We held a family council after breakfast, and in this, though I was only
twelve, I took an eager and determined part. I loved work--it has
always been my favorite form of recreation--and my spirit rose to the
opportunities of it which smiled on us from every side. Obviously the
first thing to do was to put doors and windows into the yawning holes
father had left for them, and to lay a board flooring over the earth
inside our cabin walls, and these duties we accomplished before we had
occupied our new home a fortnight. There was a small saw-mill nine miles
from our cabin, on the spot that is now Big Rapids, and there we bought
our lumber. The labor we supplied ourselves, and though we put our
hearts into it and the results at the time seemed beautiful to our
partial eyes, I am forced to admit, in looking back upon them, that they
halted this side of perfection. We began by making three windows and two
doors; then, inspired by these achievements, we ambitiously constructed
an attic and divided the ground floor with partitions, which gave us
four rooms.

The general effect was temperamental and sketchy. The boards which
formed the floor were never even nailed down; they were fine, wide
planks without a knot in them, and they looked so well that we merely
fitted them together as closely as we could and lightheartedly let them
go at that. Neither did we properly chink the house. Nothing is
more comfortable than a log cabin which has been carefully built and
finished; but for some reason--probably because there seemed always a
more urgent duty calling to us around the corner--we never plastered
our house at all. The result was that on many future winter mornings we
awoke to find ourselves chastely blanketed by snow, while the only warm
spot in our living-room was that directly in front of the fireplace,
where great logs burned all day. Even there our faces scorched while
our spines slowly congealed, until we learned to revolve before the fire
like a bird upon a spit. No doubt we would have worked more thoroughly
if my brother James, who was twenty years old and our tower of strength,
had remained with us; but when we had been in our new home only a few
months he fell and was forced to go East for an operation. He was never
able to return to us, and thus my mother, we three young girls, and my
youngest brother--Harry, who was only eight years old--made our fight
alone until father came to us, more than a year later.

Mother was practically an invalid. She had a nervous affection which
made it impossible for her to stand without the support of a chair. But
she sewed with unusual skill, and it was due to her that our clothes,
notwithstanding the strain to which we subjected them, were always in
good condition. She sewed for hours every day, and she was able to move
about the house, after a fashion, by pushing herself around on a stool
which James made for her as soon as we arrived. He also built for her a
more comfortable chair with a high back.

The division of labor planned at the first council was that mother
should do our sewing, and my older sisters, Eleanor and Mary, the
housework, which was far from taxing, for of course we lived in the
simplest manner. My brothers and I were to do the work out of doors, an
arrangement that suited me very well, though at first, owing to our lack
of experience, our activities were somewhat curtailed. It was too late
in the season for plowing or planting, even if we had possessed anything
with which to plow, and, moreover, our so-called "cleared" land was
thick with sturdy tree-stumps. Even during the second summer plowing was
impossible; we could only plant potatoes and corn, and follow the most
primitive method in doing even this. We took an ax, chopped up the sod,
put the seed under it, and let the seed grow. The seed did grow, too--in
the most gratifying and encouraging manner. Our green corn and potatoes
were the best I have ever eaten. But for the present we lacked these
luxuries.

We had, however, in their place, large quantities of wild
fruit--gooseberries, raspberries, and plums--which Harry and I gathered
on the banks of our creek. Harry also became an expert fisherman. We
had no hooks or lines, but he took wires from our hoop-skirts and made
snares at the ends of poles. My part of this work was to stand on a
log and frighten the fish out of their holes by making horrible sounds,
which I did with impassioned earnestness. When the fish hurried to the
surface of the water to investigate the appalling noises they had heard,
they were easily snared by our small boy, who was very proud of his
ability to contribute in this way to the family table.

During our first winter we lived largely on cornmeal, making a little
journey of twenty miles to the nearest mill to buy it; but even at that
we were better off than our neighbors, for I remember one family in our
region who for an entire winter lived solely on coarse-grained yellow
turnips, gratefully changing their diet to leeks when these came in the
spring.

Such furniture as we had we made ourselves. In addition to my mother's
two chairs and the bunks which took the place of beds, James made a
settle for the living-room, as well as a table and several stools. At
first we had our tree-cutting done for us, but we soon became expert in
this gentle art, and I developed such skill that in later years, after
father came, I used to stand with him and "heart" a log.

On every side, and at every hour of the day, we came up against the
relentless limitations of pioneer life. There was not a team of horses
in our entire region. The team with which my brother had driven us
through the wilderness had been hired at Grand Rapids for that occasion,
and, of course, immediately returned. Our lumber was delivered by
ox-teams, and the absolutely essential purchases we made "outside" (at
the nearest shops, forty miles away) were carried through the forest on
the backs of men. Our mail was delivered once a month by a carrier who
made the journey in alternate stages of horseback riding and canoeing.
But we had health, youth, enthusiasm, good appetites, and the
wherewithal to satisfy them, and at night in our primitive bunks we
sank into abysses of dreamless slumber such as I have never known since.
Indeed, looking back upon them, those first months seem to have been a
long-drawn-out and glorious picnic, interrupted only by occasional hours
of pain or panic, when we were hurt or frightened.

Naturally, our two greatest menaces were wild animals and Indians, but
as the days passed the first of these lost the early terrors with which
we had associated them. We grew indifferent to the sounds that had made
our first night a horror to us all--there was even a certain homeliness
in them--while we regarded with accustomed, almost blase eyes the
various furred creatures of which we caught distant glimpses as they
slunk through the forest. Their experience with other settlers had
taught them caution; it soon became clear that they were as eager to
avoid us as we were to shun them, and by common consent we gave each
other ample elbow-room. But the Indians were all around us, and every
settler had a collection of hair-raising tales to tell of them. It was
generally agreed that they were dangerous only when they were drunk;
but as they were drunk whenever they could get whisky, and as whisky
was constantly given them in exchange for pelts and game, there was a
harrowing doubt in our minds whenever they approached us.

In my first encounter with them I was alone in the woods at sunset with
my small brother Harry. We were hunting a cow James had bought, and our
young eyes were peering eagerly among the trees, on the alert for any
moving object. Suddenly, at a little distance, and coming directly
toward us, we saw a party of Indians. There were five of them, all men,
walking in single file, as noiselessly as ghosts, their moccasined feet
causing not even a rustle among the dry leaves that carpeted the woods.
All the horrible stories we had heard of Indian cruelty flashed into
our minds, and for a moment we were dumb with terror. Then I remembered
having been told that the one thing one must not do before them is to
show fear. Harry was carrying a rope with which we had expected to lead
home our reluctant cow, and I seized one end of it and whispered to him
that we would "play horse," pretending he was driving me. We pranced
toward the Indians on feet that felt like lead, and with eyes so glazed
by terror that we could see nothing save a line of moving figures;
but as we passed them they did not give to our little impersonation
of care-free children even the tribute of a side-glance. They were,
we realized, headed straight for our home; and after a few moments we
doubled on our tracks and, keeping at a safe distance from them among
the trees, ran back to warn our mother that they were coming.

As it happened, James was away, and mother had to meet her unwelcome
guests supported only by her young children. She at once prepared a
meal, however, and when they arrived she welcomed them calmly and gave
them the best she had. After they had eaten they began to point at
and demand objects they fancied in the room--my brother's pipe, some
tobacco, a bowl, and such trifles--and my mother, who was afraid to
annoy them by refusal, gave them what they asked. They were quite
sober, and though they left without expressing any appreciation of her
hospitality, they made her a second visit a few months later, bringing a
large quantity of venison and a bag of cranberries as a graceful return.
These Indians were Ottawas; and later we became very friendly with them
and their tribe, even to the degree of attending one of their dances,
which I shall describe later.

Our second encounter with Indians was a less agreeable experience. There
were seven "Marquette warriors" in the next group of callers, and they
were all intoxicated. Moreover, they had brought with them several jugs
of bad whisky--the raw and craze-provoking product supplied them by the
fur-dealers--and it was clear that our cabin was to be the scene of an
orgy. Fortunately, my brother James was at home on this occasion, and as
the evening grew old and the Indians, grouped together around the fire,
became more and more irresponsible, he devised a plan for our safety.
Our attic was finished, and its sole entrance was by a ladder through
a trap-door. At James's whispered command my sister Eleanor slipped up
into the attic, and from the back window let down a rope, to which he
tied all the weapons we had--his gun and several axes. These Eleanor
drew up and concealed in one of the bunks. My brother then directed that
as quietly as possible, and at long intervals, one member of the family
after another was to slip up the ladder and into the attic, going quite
casually, that the Indians might not realize what we were doing. Once
there, with the ladder drawn up after us and the trap-door closed, we
would be reasonably safe, unless our guests decided to burn the cabin.

The evening seemed endless, and was certainly nerve-racking. The Indians
ate everything in the house, and from my seat in a dim corner I watched
them while my sisters waited on them. I can still see the tableau they
made in the firelit room and hear the unfamiliar accents of their speech
as they talked together. Occasionally one of them would pull a hair from
his head, seize his scalping-knife; and cut the hair with it--a most
unpleasant sight! When either of my sisters approached them some of the
Indians would make gestures, as if capturing and scalping her. Through
it all, however, the whisky held their close attention, and it was due
to this that we succeeded in reaching the attic unobserved, James coming
last of all and drawing the ladder after him. Mother and the children
were then put to bed; but through that interminable night James and
Eleanor lay flat upon the floor, watching through the cracks between the
boards the revels of the drunken Indians, which grew wilder with every
hour that crawled toward sunrise. There was no knowing when they would
miss us or how soon their mood might change. At any moment they might
make an attack upon us or set fire to the cabin. By dawn, however, their
whisky was all gone, and they were in so deep a stupor that, one after
the other, the seven fell from their chairs to the floor, where they
sprawled unconscious. When they awoke they left quietly and without
trouble of any kind. They seemed a strangely subdued and chastened band;
probably they were wretchedly ill after their debauch on the adulterated
whisky the traders had given them.

That autumn the Ottawa tribe had a great corn celebration, to which we
and the other settlers were invited. James and my older sisters attended
it, and I went with them, by my own urgent invitation. It seemed to me
that as I was sharing the work and the perils of our new environment,
I might as well share its joys; and I finally succeeded in making
my family see the logic of this position. The central feature of the
festivity was a huge kettle, many feet in circumference, into which the
Indians dropped the most extraordinary variety of food we had ever seen
combined. Deer heads went into it whole, as well as every kind of meat
and vegetable the members of the tribe could procure. We all ate some of
this agreeable mixture, and later, with one another, and even with
the Indians, we danced gaily to the music of a tom-tom and a drum. The
affair was extremely interesting until the whisky entered and did its
unpleasant work. When our hosts began to fall over in the dance and
slumber where they lay, and when the squaws began to show the same ill
effects of their refreshments, we unostentatiously slipped away.

During the winter life offered us few diversions and many hardships. Our
creek froze over, and the water problem became a serious one, which
we met with increasing difficulty as the temperature steadily fell. We
melted snow and ice, and existed through the frozen months, but with
an amount of discomfort which made us unwilling to repeat at least that
special phase of our experience. In the spring, therefore, I made a
well. Long before this, James had gone, and Harry and I were now the
only outdoor members of our working-force. Harry was still too small to
help with the well; but a young man, who had formed the neighborly habit
of riding eighteen miles to call on us, gave me much friendly aid. We
located the well with a switch, and when we had dug as far as we could
reach with our spades, my assistant descended into the hole and threw
the earth up to the edge, from which I in turn removed it. As the well
grew deeper we made a half-way shelf, on which I stood, he throwing the
earth on the shelf, and I shoveling it up from that point. Later, as he
descended still farther into the hole we were making, he shoveled the
earth into buckets and passed them up to me, I passing them on to my
sister, who was now pressed into service. When the excavation was deep
enough we made the wall of slabs of wood, roughly joined together. I
recall that well with calm content. It was not a thing of beauty, but
it was a thoroughly practical well, and it remained the only one we had
during the twelve years the family occupied the cabin.

During our first year there was no school within ten miles of us, but
this lack failed to sadden Harry or me. We had brought with us from
Lawrence a box of books, in which, in winter months, when our outdoor
work was restricted, we found much comfort. They were the only books
in that part of the country, and we read them until we knew them all by
heart. Moreover, father sent us regularly the New York Independent, and
with this admirable literature, after reading it, we papered our walls.
Thus, on stormy days, we could lie on the settle or the floor and read
the Independent over again with increased interest and pleasure.

Occasionally father sent us the Ledger, but here mother drew a definite
line. She had a special dislike for that periodical, and her severest
comment on any woman was that she was the type who would "keep a dog,
make saleratus biscuit, and read the New York Ledger in the daytime."
Our modest library also contained several histories of Greece and Rome,
which must have been good ones, for years later, when I entered college,
I passed my examination in ancient history with no other preparation
than this reading. There were also a few arithmetics and algebras, a
historical novel or two, and the inevitable copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
whose pages I had freely moistened with my tears.

When the advantages of public education were finally extended to me,
at thirteen, by the opening of a school three miles from our home,
I accepted them with growing reluctance. The teacher was a spinster
forty-four years of age and the only genuine "old maid" I have ever met
who was not a married woman or a man. She was the real thing, and
her name, Prudence Duncan, seemed the fitting label for her rigidly
uncompromising personality. I graced Prudence's school for three months,
and then left it at her fervid request. I had walked six miles a day
through trackless woods and Western blizzards to get what she could
give me, but she had little to offer my awakened and critical mind.
My reading and my Lawrence school-work had already taught me more than
Prudence knew--a fact we both inwardry--admitted and fiercely resented
from our different viewpoints. Beyond doubt I was a pert and trying
young person. I lost no opportunity to lead Prudence beyond her
intellectual depth and leave her there, and Prudence vented her chagrin
not alone upon me, but upon my little brother. I became a thorn in her
side, and one day, after an especially unpleasant episode in which Harry
also figured, she plucked me out, as it were, and cast me for ever from
her. From that time I studied at home, where I was a much more valuable
economic factor than I had been in school.

The second spring after our arrival Harry and I extended our operations
by tapping the sugar-bushes, collecting all the sap, and carrying it
home in pails slung from our yoke-laden shoulders. Together we made one
hundred and fifty pounds of sugar and a barrel of syrup, but here again,
as always, we worked in primitive ways. To get the sap we chopped a gash
in the tree and drove in a spile. Then we dug out a trough to catch the
sap. It was no light task to lift these troughs full of sap and empty
the sap into buckets, but we did it successfully, and afterward built
fires and boiled it down. By this time we had also cleared some of our
ground, and during the spring we were able to plow, dividing the work in
a way that seemed fair to us both. These were strenuous occupations
for a boy of nine and a girl of thirteen, but, though we were not
inordinately good children, we never complained; we found them very
satisfactory substitutes for more normal bucolic joys. Inevitably, we
had our little tragedies. Our cow died, and for an entire winter we went
without milk. Our coffee soon gave out, and as a substitute we made
and used a mixture of browned peas and burnt rye. In the winter we were
always cold, and the water problem, until we had built our well, was
ever with us.

Father joined us at the end of eighteen months, but though his presence
gave us pleasure and moral support, he was not an addition to our
executive staff. He brought with him a rocking-chair for mother and a
new supply of books, on which I fell as a starving man falls upon food.
Father read as eagerly as I, but much more steadily. His mind was always
busy with problems, and if, while he was laboring in the field, a new
problem presented itself to him, the imperishable curiosity that was in
him made him scurry at once to the house to solve it. I have known him
to spend a planting season in figuring on the production of a certain
number of kernels of corn, instead of planting the corn and raising
it. In the winter he was supposed to spend his time clearing land for
orchards and the like, but instead he pored over his books and problems
day after day and often half the night as well. It soon became known
among our neighbors, who were rapidly increasing in number, that we had
books and that father like to read aloud, and men walked ten miles or
more to spend the night with us and listen to his reading. Often, as his
fame grew, ten or twelve men would arrive at our cabin on Saturday and
remain over Sunday. When my mother once tried to check this influx of
guests by mildly pointing out, among other things, the waste of candles
represented by frequent all-night readings, every man humbly appeared
again on the following Saturday with a candle in each hand. They were
not sensitive; and, as they had brought their candles, it seemed fitting
to them and to father that we girls should cook for them and supply them
with food.

Father's tolerance of idleness in others, however, did not extend to
tolerance of idleness in us, and this led to my first rebellion, which
occurred when I was fourteen. For once, I had been in the woods all day,
buried in my books; and when I returned at night, still in the dream
world these books had opened to me, father was awaiting my coming with
a brow dark with disapproval. As it happened, mother had felt that day
some special need of me, and father reproached me bitterly for being
beyond reach--an idler who wasted time while mother labored. He ended
a long arraignment by predicting gloomily that with such tendencies I
would make nothing of my life.

The injustice of the criticism cut deep; I knew I had done and was doing
my share for the family, and already, too, I had begun to feel the call
of my career. For some reason I wanted to preach--to talk to people,
to tell them things. Just why, just what, I did not yet know--but I had
begun to preach in the silent woods, to stand up on stumps and address
the unresponsive trees, to feel the stir of aspiration within me.

When my father had finished all he wished to say, I looked at him and
answered, quietly, "Father, some day I am going to college."

I can still see his slight, ironical smile. It drove me to a second
prediction. I was young enough to measure success by material results,
so I added, recklessly:

"And before I die I shall be worth ten thousand dollars!"

The amount staggered me even as it dropped from my lips. It was the
largest fortune my imagination could conceive, and in my heart I
believed that no woman ever had possessed or would possess so much. So
far as I knew, too, no woman had gone to college. But now that I had put
my secret hopes into words, I was desperately determined to make those
hopes come true. After I became a wage-earner I lost my desire to make
a fortune, but the college dream grew with the years; and though my
college career seemed as remote as the most distant star, I hitched my
little wagon to that star and never afterward wholly lost sight of its
friendly gleam.

When I was fifteen years old I was offered a situation as
school-teacher. By this time the community was growing around us with
the rapidity characteristic of these Western settlements, and we
had nearer neighbors whose children needed instruction. I passed
an examination before a schoolboard consisting of three nervous and
self-conscious men whose certificate I still hold, and I at once began
my professional career on the modest salary of two dollars a week and my
board. The school was four miles from my home, so I "boarded round" with
the families of my pupils, staying two weeks in each place, and
often walking from three to six miles a day to and from my little log
school-house in every kind of weather. During the first year I had about
fourteen pupils, of varying ages, sizes, and temperaments, and there was
hardly a book in the school-room except those I owned. One little girl,
I remember, read from an almanac, while a second used a hymn-book.

In winter the school-house was heated by a woodstove, to which the
teacher had to give close personal attention. I could not depend on
my pupils to make the fires or carry in the fuel; and it was often
necessary to fetch the wood myself, sometimes for long distances through
the forest. Again and again, after miles of walking through winter
storms, I reached the school-house with my clothing wet through, and
in these soaked garments I taught during the day. In "boarding round"
I often found myself in one-room cabins, with bunks at the end and the
sole partition a sheet or a blanket, behind which I slept with one or
two of the children. It was the custom on these occasions for the man
of the house to delicately retire to the barn while we women got to bed,
and to disappear again in the morning while we dressed. In some places
the meals were so badly cooked that I could not eat them, and often the
only food my poor little pupils brought to school for their noonday meal
was a piece of bread or a bit of raw pork.

I earned my two dollars a week that year, but I had to wait for my wages
until the dog tax was collected in the spring. When the money was thus
raised, and the twenty-six dollars for my thirteen weeks of teaching
were graciously put into my hands, I went "outside" to the nearest shop
and joyously spent almost the entire amount for my first "party dress."
The gown I bought was, I considered, a beautiful creation. In color it
was a rich magenta, and the skirt was elaborately braided with black
cable-cord. My admiration for it was justified, for it did all a young
girl's eager heart could ask of any gown--it led to my first proposal.

The youth who sought my hand was about twenty years old, and by an
unhappy chance he was also the least attractive young person in the
countryside--the laughing-stock of the neighbors, the butt of his
associates. The night he came to offer me his heart there were already
two young men at our home calling on my sisters, and we were all sitting
around the fire in the living-room when my suitor appeared. His costume,
like himself, left much to be desired. He wore a blue flannel shirt and
a pair of trousers made of flour-bags. Such trousers were not uncommon
in our region, and the boy's mother, who had made them for him, had
thoughtfully selected a nice clean pair of sacks. But on one leg was
the name of the firm that made the flour--A. and G. W. Green--and by a
charming coincidence A. and G. W. Green happened to be the two young men
who were calling on my sisters! On the back of the bags, directly in the
rear of the wearer, was the simple legend, "96 pounds"; and the striking
effect of the young man's costume was completed by a bright yellow sash
which held his trousers in place.

The vision fascinated my sisters and their two guests. They gave
it their entire attention, and when the new-comer signified with an
eloquent gesture that he was calling on me, and beckoned me into an
inner room, the quartet arose as one person and followed us to the door.
Then, as we inhospitably closed the door, they fastened their eyes to
the cracks in the living-room wall, that they might miss none of the
entertainment. When we were alone my guest and I sat down in facing
chairs and in depressed silence. The young man was nervous, and I was
both frightened and annoyed. I had heard suppressed giggles on the other
side of the wall, and I realized, as my self-centered visitor failed
to do, that we were not enjoying the privacy the situation seemed to
demand. At last the youth informed me that his "dad" had just given him
a cabin, a yoke of steers, a cow, and some hens. When this announcement
had produced its full effect, he straightened up in his chair and asked,
solemnly, "Will ye have me?"

An outburst of chortles from the other side of the wall greeted the
proposal, but the ardent youth ignored it, if indeed he heard it. With
eyes staring straight ahead, he sat rigid, waiting for my answer; and I,
anxious only to get rid of him and to end the strain of the moment,
said the first thing that came into my head. "I can't," I told him. "I'm
sorry, but--but--I'm engaged."

He rose quickly, with the effect of a half-closed jack-knife that is
suddenly opened, and for an instant stood looking down upon me. He was
six feet two inches tall, and extremely thin. I am very short, and, as
I looked up, his flour-bag trousers seemed to join his yellow sash
somewhere near the ceiling of the room. He put both hands into
his pockets and slowly delivered his valedictory. "That's darned
disappointing to a fellow," he said, and left the house. After a
moment devoted to regaining my maidenly composure I returned to the
living-room, where I had the privilege of observing the enjoyment of
my sisters and their visitors. Helpless with mirth and with tears of
pleasure on their cheeks, the four rocked and shrieked as they recalled
the picture my gallant had presented. For some time after that incident
I felt a strong distaste for sentiment.

Clad royally in the new gown, I attended my first ball in November,
going with a party of eight that included my two sisters, another girl,
and four young men. The ball was at Big Rapids, which by this time had
grown to be a thriving lumber town. It was impossible to get a team of
horses or even a yoke of oxen for the journey, so we made a raft and
went down the river on that, taking our party dresses with us in trunks.
Unfortunately, the raft "hung up" in the stream, and the four young men
had to get out into the icy water and work a long time before they
could detach it from the rocks. Naturally, they were soaked and chilled
through, but they all bore the experience with a gay philosophy.

When we reached Big Rapids we dressed for the ball, and, as in those
days it was customary to change one's gown again at midnight, I had an
opportunity to burst on the assemblage in two costumes--the second made
of bedroom chintz, with a low neck and short sleeves. We danced the
"money musk," and the "Virginia reel," "hoeing her down" (which means
changing partners) in true pioneer style. I never missed a dance at this
or any subsequent affair, and I was considered the gayest and the most
tireless young person at our parties until I became a Methodist minister
and dropped such worldly vanities. The first time I preached in my home
region all my former partners came to hear me, and listened with wide,
understanding, reminiscent smiles which made it very hard for me to keep
soberly to my text.

In the near future I had reason to regret the extravagant expenditure of
my first earnings. For my second year of teaching, in the same school, I
was to receive five dollars a week and to pay my own board. I selected a
place two miles and a half from the school-house, and was promptly asked
by my host to pay my board in advance. This, he explained, was due to no
lack of faith in me; the money would enable him to go "outside" to work,
leaving his family well supplied with provisions. I allowed him to go
to the school committee and collect my board in advance, at the rate of
three dollars a week for the season. When I presented myself at my new
boarding-place, however, two days later, I found the house nailed up and
deserted; the man and his family had departed with my money, and I was
left, as my committeemen sympathetically remarked, "high and dry." There
were only two dollars a week coming to me after that, so I walked back
and forth between my home and my school, almost four miles, twice a day;
and during this enforced exercise there was ample opportunity to reflect
on the fleeting joy of riches.

In the mean time war had been declared. When the news came that Fort
Sumter had been fired on, and that Lincoln had called for troops, our
men were threshing. There was only one threshing-machine in the region
at that time, and it went from place to place, the farmers doing their
threshing whenever they could get the machine. I remember seeing a
man ride up on horseback, shouting out Lincoln's demand for troops and
explaining that a regiment was being formed at Big Rapids. Before he had
finished speaking the men on the machine had leaped to the ground and
rushed off to enlist, my brother Jack, who had recently joined us, among
them. In ten minutes not one man was left in the field. A few months
later my brother Tom enlisted as a bugler--he was a mere boy at the
time--and not long after that my father followed the example of his sons
and served until the war was ended. He had entered on the twenty-ninth
of August, 1862, as an army steward; he came back to us with the rank of
lieutenant and assistant surgeon of field and staff.

Between those years I was the principal support of our family, and life
became a strenuous and tragic affair. For months at a time we had no
news from the front. The work in our community, if it was done at all,
was done by despairing women whose hearts were with their men. When care
had become our constant guest, Death entered our home as well. My sister
Eleanor had married, and died in childbirth, leaving her baby to me;
and the blackest hours of those black years were the hours that saw her
passing. I can see her still, lying in a stupor from which she roused
herself at intervals to ask about her child. She insisted that our
brother Tom should name the baby, but Tom was fighting for his country,
unless he had already preceded Eleanor through the wide portal that was
opening before her. I could only tell her that I had written to him; but
before the assurance was an hour old she would climb up from the gulf
of unconsciousness with infinite effort to ask if we had received his
reply. At last, to calm her, I told her it had come, and that Tom had
chosen for her little son the name of Arthur. She smiled at this and
drew a deep breath; then, still smiling, she passed away. Her baby
slipped into her vacant place and almost filled our heavy hearts, but
only for a short time; for within a few months after his mother's death
his father married again and took him from me, and it seemed that with
his going we had lost all that made life worth while.

The problem of living grew harder with everyday. We eked out our little
income in every way we could, taking as boarders the workers in the
logging-camps, making quilts, which we sold, and losing no chance to
earn a penny in any legitimate manner. Again my mother did such outside
sewing as she could secure, yet with every month of our effort the gulf
between our income and our expenses grew wider, and the price of the
bare necessities of exisence{sic} climbed up and up. The largest amount
I could earn at teaching was six dollars a week, and our school year
included only two terms of thirteen weeks each. It was an incessant
struggle to keep our land, to pay our taxes, and to live. Calico was
selling at fifty cents a yard. Coffee was one dollar a pound. There were
no men left to grind our corn, to get in our crops, or to care for our
live stock; and all around us we saw our struggle reflected in the lives
of our neighbors.

At long intervals word came to us of battles in which my father's
regiment--the Tenth Michigan Cavalry Volunteers--or those of my brothers
were engaged, and then longer intervals followed in which we heard no
news. After Eleanor's death my brother Tom was wounded, and for months
we lived in terror of worse tidings, but he finally recovered. I was
walking seven and eight miles a day, and doing extra work before and
after school hours, and my health began to fail. Those were years I do
not like to look back upon--years in which life had degenerated into a
treadmill whose monotony was broken only by the grim messages from the
front. My sister Mary married and went to Big Rapids to live. I had no
time to dream my dream, but the star of my one purpose still glowed in
my dark horizon. It seemed that nothing short of a miracle could lift my
feet from their plodding way and set them on the wider path toward which
my eyes were turned, but I never lost faith that in some manner the
miracle would come to pass. As certainly as I have ever known anything,
I KNEW that I was going to college!




III. HIGH-SCHOOL AND COLLEGE DAYS

The end of the Civil War brought freedom to me, too. When peace was
declared my father and brothers returned to the claim in the wilderness
which we women of the family had labored so desperately to hold while
they were gone. To us, as to others, the final years of the war had
brought many changes. My sister Eleanor's place was empty. Mary, as I
have said, had married and gone to live in Big Rapids, and my mother
and I were alone with my brother Harry, now a boy of fourteen. After the
return of our men it was no longer necessary to devote every penny of
my earnings to the maintenance of our home. For the first time I could
begin to save a portion of my income toward the fulfilment of my college
dream, but even yet there was a long, arid stretch ahead of me before
the college doors came even distantly into sight.

The largest salary I could earn by teaching in our Northern woods was
one hundred and fifty-six dollars a year, for two terms of thirteen
weeks each; and from this, of course, I had to deduct the cost of my
board and clothing--the sole expenditure I allowed myself. The dollars
for an education accumulated very, very slowly, until at last, in
desperation, weary of seeing the years of my youth rush past, bearing my
hopes with them, I took a sudden and radical step. I gave up teaching,
left our cabin in the woods, and went to Big Rapids to live with my
sister Mary, who had married a successful man and who generously offered
me a home. There, I had decided, I would learn a trade of some kind, of
any kind; it did not greatly matter what it was. The sole essential was
that it should be a money-making trade, offering wages which would make
it possible to add more rapidly to my savings. In those days, almost
fifty years ago, and in a small pioneer town, the fields open to women
were few and unfruitful. The needle at once presented itself, but at
first I turned with loathing from it. I would have preferred the digging
of ditches or the shoveling of coal; but the needle alone persistently
pointed out my way, and I was finally forced to take it.

Fate, however, as if weary at last of seeing me between her paws,
suddenly let me escape. Before I had been working a month at my
uncongenial trade Big Rapids was favored by a visit from a Universalist
woman minister, the Reverend Marianna Thompson, who came there to
preach. Her sermon was delivered on Sunday morning, and I was, I think,
almost the earliest arrival of the great congregation which filled the
church. It was a wonderful moment when I saw my first woman minister
enter her pulpit; and as I listened to her sermon, thrilled to the soul,
all my early aspirations to become a minister myself stirred in me with
cumulative force. After the services I hung for a time on the fringe of
the group that surrounded her, and at last, when she was alone and about
to leave, I found courage to introduce myself and pour forth the tale of
my ambition. Her advice was as prompt as if she had studied my problem
for years.

"My child," she said, "give up your foolish idea of learning a trade,
and go to school. You can't do anything until you have an education. Get
it, and get it NOW."

Her suggestion was much to my liking, and I paid her the compliment of
acting on it promptly, for the next morning I entered the Big Rapids
High School, which was also a preparatory school for college. There I
would study, I determined, as long as my money held out, and with the
optimism of youth I succeeded in confining my imagination to this side
of that crisis. My home, thanks to Mary, was assured; the wardrobe I had
brought from the woods covered me sufficiently; to one who had
walked five and six miles a day for years, walking to school held no
discomfort; and as for pleasure, I found it, like a heroine of fiction,
in my studies. For the first time life was smiling at me, and with all
my young heart I smiled back.

The preceptress of the high school was Lucy Foot, a college graduate and
a remarkable woman. I had heard much of her sympathy and understanding;
and on the evening following my first day in school I went to her
and repeated the confidences I had reposed in the Reverend Marianna
Thompson. My trust in her was justified. She took an immediate interest
in me, and proved it at once by putting me into the speaking and
debating classes, where I was given every opportunity to hold forth to
helpless classmates when the spirit of eloquence moved me.

As an aid to public speaking I was taught to "elocute," and I remember
in every mournful detail the occasion on which I gave my first
recitation. We were having our monthly "public exhibition night," and
the audience included not only my classmates, but their parents and
friends as well. The selection I intended to recite was a poem entitled
"No Sects in Heaven," but when I faced my audience I was so appalled by
its size and by the sudden realization of my own temerity that I fainted
during the delivery of the first verse. Sympathetic classmates carried
me into an anteroom and revived me, after which they naturally assumed
that the entertainment I furnished was over for the evening. I, however,
felt that if I let that failure stand against me I could never afterward
speak in public; and within ten minutes, notwithstanding the protests of
my friends, I was back in the hall and beginning my recitation a second
time. The audience gave me its eager attention. Possibly it hoped to see
me topple off the platform again, but nothing of the sort occurred.
I went through the recitation with self-possession and received some
friendly applause at the end. Strangely enough, those first sensations
of "stage fright" have been experienced, in a lesser degree, in
connection with each of the thousands of public speeches I have made
since that time. I have never again gone so far as to faint in the
presence of an audience; but I have invariably walked out on the
platform feeling the sinking sensation at the pit of the stomach,
the weakness of the knees, that I felt in the hour of my debut. Now,
however, the nervousness passes after a moment or two.

From that night Miss Foot lost no opportunity of putting me into the
foreground of our school affairs. I took part in all our debates,
recited yards of poetry to any audience we could attract, and even shone
mildly in our amateur theatricals. It was probably owing to all this
activity that I attracted the interest of the presiding elder of our
district--Dr. Peck, a man of progressive ideas. There was at that time a
movement on foot to license women to preach in the Methodist Church, and
Dr. Peck was ambitious to be the first presiding elder to have a woman
ordained for the Methodist ministry. He had urged Miss Foot to be this
pioneer, but her ambitions did not turn in that direction. Though she
was a very devout Methodist, she had no wish to be the shepherd of a
religious flock. She loved her school-work, and asked nothing better
than to remain in it. Gently but persistently she directed the attention
of Dr. Peck to me, and immediately things began to happen.

Without telling me to what it might lead, Miss Foot finally arranged
a meeting at her home by inviting Dr. Peck and me to dinner.
Being unconscious of any significance in the occasion, I chatted
light-heartedly about the large issues of life and probably settled most
of them to my personal satisfaction. Dr. Peck drew me out and led me
on, listened and smiled. When the evening was over and we rose to go, he
turned to me with sudden seriousness:

"My quarterly meeting will be held at Ashton," he remarked, casually. "I
would like you to preach the quarterly sermon."

For a moment the earth seemed to slip away from my feet. I stared at
him in utter stupefaction. Then slowly I realized that, incredible as it
seemed, the man was in earnest.

"Why," I stammered, "_I_ can't preach a sermon!"

Dr. Peck smiled at me. "Have you ever tried?" he asked.

I started to assure him vehemently that I never had. Then, as if Time
had thrown a picture on a screen before me, I saw myself as a little
girl preaching alone in the forest, as I had so often preached to a
congregation of listening trees. I qualified my answer.

"Never," I said, "to human beings."

Dr. Peck smiled again. "Well," he told me, "the door is open. Enter or
not, as you wish."

He left the house, but I remained to discuss his overwhelming
proposition with Miss Foot. A sudden sobering thought had come to me.

"But," I exclaimed, "I've never been converted. How can I preach to any
one?"

We both had the old-time idea of conversion, which now seems so
mistaken. We thought one had to struggle with sin and with the Lord
until at last the heart opened, doubts were dispersed, and the light
poured in. Miss Foot could only advise me to put the matter before the
Lord, to wrestle and to pray; and thereafter, for hours at a time, she
worked and prayed with me, alternately urging, pleading, instructing,
and sending up petitions in my behalf. Our last session was a dramatic
one, which took up the entire night. Long before it was over we were
both worn out; but toward morning, either from exhaustion of body or
exaltation of soul, I seemed to see the light, and it made me very
happy. With all my heart I wanted to preach, and I believed that now at
last I had my call. The following day we sent word to Dr. Peck that I
would preach the sermon at Ashton as he had asked, but we urged him to
say nothing of the matter for the present, and Miss Foot and I also
kept the secret locked in our breasts. I knew only too well what view
my family and my friends would take of such a step and of me. To them it
would mean nothing short of personal disgrace and a blotted page in the
Shaw record.

I had six weeks in which to prepare my sermon, and I gave it most of my
waking hours as well as those in which I should have been asleep. I took
for my text: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even
so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish, but have eternal life."

It was not until three days before I preached the sermon that I found
courage to confide my purpose to my sister Mary, and if I had confessed
my intention to commit a capital crime she could not have been more
disturbed. We two had always been very close, and the death of Eleanor,
to whom we were both devoted, had drawn us even nearer to each other.
Now Mary's tears and prayers wrung my heart and shook my resolution.
But, after all, she was asking me to give up my whole future, to close
my ears to my call, and I felt that I could not do it. My decision
caused an estrangement between us which lasted for years. On the day
preceding the delivery of my sermon I left for Ashton on the afternoon
train; and in the same car, but as far away from me as she could get,
Mary sat alone and wept throughout the journey. She was going to my
mother, but she did not speak to me; and I, for my part, facing both
alienation from her and the ordeal before me, found my one comfort in
Lucy Foot's presence and understanding sympathy.

There was no church in Ashton, so I preached my sermon in its one little
school-house, which was filled with a curious crowd, eager to look at
and hear the girl who was defying all conventions by getting out of
the pew and into the pulpit. There was much whispering and suppressed
excitement before I began, but when I gave out my text silence fell upon
the room, and from that moment until I had finished my hearers listened
quietly. A kerosene-lamp stood on a stand at my elbow, and as I preached
I trembled so violently that the oil shook in its glass globe; but I
finished without breaking down, and at the end Dr. Peck, who had his own
reasons for nervousness, handsomely assured me that my first sermon was
better than his maiden effort had been. It was evidently not a failure,
for the next day he invited me to follow him around in his circuit,
which included thirty-six appointments; he wished me to preach in
each of the thirty-six places, as it was desirable to let the various
ministers hear and know me before I applied for my license as a local
preacher.

The sermon also had another result, less gratifying. It brought out,
on the following morning, the first notice of me ever printed in a
newspaper. This was instigated by my brother-in-law, and it was brief
but pointed. It read:


A young girl named Anna Shaw, seventeen years old, [1] preached at Ashton
yesterday. Her real friends deprecate the course she is pursuing.

[Footnote 1: A misstatement by the brother-in-law. Dr. Shaw was at
this time twenty-three years old.--E. J.]

The little notice had something of the effect of a lighted match applied
to gunpowder. An explosion of public sentiment followed it, the entire
community arose in consternation, and I became a bone of contention over
which friends and strangers alike wrangled until they wore themselves
out. The members of my family, meeting in solemn council, sent for me,
and I responded. They had a proposition to make, and they lost no time
in putting it before me. If I gave up my preaching they would send me to
college and pay for my entire course. They suggested Ann Arbor, and Ann
Arbor tempted me sorely; but to descend from the pulpit I had at last
entered--the pulpit I had visualized in all my childish dreams--was
not to be considered. We had a long evening together, and it was a very
unhappy one. At the end of it I was given twenty-four hours in which to
decide whether I would choose my people and college, or my pulpit and
the arctic loneliness of a life that held no family-circle. It did not
require twenty-four hours of reflection to convince me that I must go my
solitary way.

That year I preached thirty-six times, at each of the presiding
elder's appointments; and the following spring, at the annual Methodist
Conference of our district, held at Big Rapids, my name was presented to
the assembled ministers as that of a candidate for a license to preach.
There was unusual interest in the result, and my father was among
those who came to the Conference to see the vote taken. During these
Conferences a minister voted affirmatively on a question by holding up
his hand, and negatively by failing to do so. When the question of my
license came up the majority of the ministers voted by raising both
hands, and in the pleasant excitement which followed my father slipped
away. Those who saw him told me he looked pleased; but he sent me no
message showing a change of viewpoint, and the gulf between the family
and its black sheep remained unbridged. Though the warmth of Mary's
love for me had become a memory, the warmth of her hearthstone was still
offered me. I accepted it, perforce, and we lived together like shadows
of what we had been. Two friends alone of all I had made stood by me
without qualification--Miss Foot and Clara Osborn, the latter my "chum"
at Big Rapids and a dweller in my heart to this day.

In the mean time my preaching had not interfered with my studies. I
was working day and night, but life was very difficult; for among my
schoolmates, too, there were doubts and much head-shaking over this
choice of a career. I needed the sound of friendly voices, for I
was very lonely; and suddenly, when the pressure from all sides was
strongest and I was going down physically under it, a voice was raised
that I had never dared to dream would speak for me. Mary A. Livermore
came to Big Rapids, and as she was then at the height of her career, the
entire countryside poured in to hear her. Far back in the crowded hall
I sat alone and listened to her, thrilled by the lecture and tremulous
with the hope of meeting the lecturer. When she had finished speaking I
joined the throng that surged forward from the body of the hall, and
as I reached her and felt the grasp of her friendly hand I had a sudden
conviction that the meeting was an epoch in my life. I was right. Some
one in the circle around us told her that I wanted to preach, and that
I was meeting tremendous opposition. She was interested at once. She
looked at me with quickening sympathy, and then, suddenly putting an arm
around me, drew me close to her side.

"My dear," she said, quietly, "if you want to preach, go on and preach.
Don't let anybody stop you. No matter what people say, don't let them
stop you!"

For a moment I was too overcome to answer her. These were almost my
first encouraging words, and the morning stars singing together could
not have made sweeter music for my ears. Before I could recover a woman
within hearing spoke up.

"Oh, Mrs. Livermore," she exclaimed, "don't say that to her! We're all
trying to stop her. Her people are wretched over the whole thing. And
don't you see how ill she is? She has one foot in the grave and the
other almost there!"

Mrs. Livermore turned upon me a long and deeply thoughtful look. "Yes,"
she said at last, "I see she has. But it is better that she should die
doing the thing she wants to do than that she should die because she
can't do it."

Her words were a tonic which restored my voice. "So they think I'm going
to die!" I cried. "Well, I'm not! I'm going to live and preach!"

I have always felt since then that without the inspiration of Mrs.
Livermore's encouragement I might not have continued my fight. Her
sanction was a shield, however, from which the criticisms of the world
fell back. Fate's more friendly interest in my affairs that year was
shown by the fact that she sent Mrs. Livermore into my life before I had
met Anna Dickinson. Miss Dickinson came to us toward spring and lectured
on Joan of Arc. Never before or since have I been more deeply moved by
a speaker. When she had finished her address I made my happy way to the
front of the hall with the others who wished to meet the distinguished
guest. It was our local manager who introduced me, and he said, "This is
our Anna Shaw. She is going to be a lecturer, too."

I looked up at the brilliant Miss Dickinson with the trustfulness of
youth in my eyes. I remembered Mrs. Livermore and I thought all
great women were like her, but I was now to experience a bitter
disillusionment. Miss Dickinson barely touched the tips of my fingers
as she looked indifferently past the side of my face. "Ah," she said,
icily, and turned away. In later years I learned how impossible it is
for a public speaker to leave a gracious impression on every life that
for a moment touches her own; but I have never ceased to be thankful
that I met Mrs. Livermore before I met Miss Dickinson at the crisis in
my career.

In the autumn of 1873 I entered Albion College, in Albion, Michigan. I
was twenty-five years of age, but I looked much younger--probably not
more than eighteen to the casual glance. Though I had made every effort
to save money, I had not been successful, for my expenses constantly
outran my little income, and my position as preacher made it necessary
for me to have a suitable wardrobe. When the time came to enter college
I had exactly eighteen dollars in the world, and I started for Albion
with this amount in my purse and without the slightest notion of how I
was to add to it. The money problem so pressed upon me, in fact, that
when I reached my destination at midnight and discovered that it would
cost fifty cents to ride from the station to the college, I saved that
amount by walking the entire distance on the railroad tracks, while my
imagination busied itself pleasantly with pictures of the engine that
might be thundering upon me in the rear. I had chosen Albion because
Miss Foot had been educated there, and I was encouraged by an incident
that happened the morning after my arrival. I was on the campus, walking
toward the main building, when I saw a big copper penny lying on the
ground, and, on picking it up, I discovered that it bore the year of my
birth. That seemed a good omen, and it was emphatically underlined by
the finding of two exactly similar pennies within a week. Though there
have been days since then when I was sorely tempted to spend them, I
have those three pennies still, and I confess to a certain comfort in
their possession!

As I had not completed my high-school course, my first days at Albion
were spent in strenuous preparation for the entrance examinations; and
one morning, as I was crossing the campus with a History of the United
States tucked coyly under my arm, I met the president of the college,
Dr. Josclyn. He stopped for a word of greeting, during which I betrayed
the fact that I had never studied United States history. Dr. Josclyn at
once invited me into his office with, I am quite sure, the purpose of
explaining as kindly as he could that my preparation for college was
insufficient. As an opening to the subject he began to talk of history,
and we talked and talked on, while unheeded hours were born and died.
We discussed the history of the United States, the governments of the
world, the causes which led to the influence of one nation on another,
the philosophical basis of the different national movements westward,
and the like. It was the longest and by far the most interesting talk I
have ever had with a highly educated man, and during it I could actually
feel my brain expand. When I rose to go President Josclyn stopped me.

"I have something to give you," he said, and he wrote a few words on
a slip of paper and handed the slip to me. When, on reaching the
dormitory, I opened it, I found that the president had passed me in the
history of the entire college course! This, moreover, was not the only
pleasant result of our interview, for within a few weeks President and
Mrs. Josclyn, whose daughter had recently died, invited me to board with
them, and I made my home with them during my first year at Albion.

My triumph in history was followed by the swift and chastening discovery
that I was behind my associates in several other branches. Owing to my
father's early help, I was well up in mathematics, but I had much to
learn of philosophy and the languages, and to these I devoted many
midnight candles.

Naturally, I soon plunged into speaking, and my first public speech at
college was a defense of Xantippe. I have always felt that the poor lady
was greatly abused, and that Socrates deserved all he received from her,
and more. I was glad to put myself on record as her champion, and my
fellow-students must soon have felt that my admiration for Xantippe was
based on similarities of temperament, for within a few months I was
leading the first college revolt against the authority of the men
students.

Albion was a coeducational institution, and the brightest jewels in
its crown were its three literary societies--the first composed of
men alone, the second of women alone, and the third of men and women
together. Each of the societies made friendly advances to new students,
and for some time I hesitated on the brink of the new joys they offered,
uncertain which to choose. A representative of the mixed society, who
was putting its claims before me, unconsciously helped me to make up my
mind.

"Women," he pompously assured me, "need to be associated with men,
because they don't know how to manage meetings."

On the instant the needle of decision swung around to the women's
society and remained there, fixed.

"If they don't," I told the pompous young man, "it's high time they
learned. I shall join the women, and we'll master the art."

I did join the women's society, and I had not been a member very long
before I discovered that when there was an advantage of any kind to be
secured the men invariably got it. While I was brooding somberly upon
this wrong an opportunity came to make a formal and effective protest
against the men's high-handed methods. The Quinquennial reunion of all
the societies was about to be held, and the special feature of this
festivity was always an oration. The simple method of selecting the
orator which had formerly prevailed had been for the young men to decide
upon the speaker and then announce his name to the women, who humbly
confirmed it. On this occasion, however, when the name came in to us,
I sent a message to our brother society to the effect that we, too,
intended to make a nomination and to send in a name.

At such unprecedented behavior the entire student body arose in
excitement, which, among the girls, was combined with equal parts of
exhilaration and awe. The men refused to consider our nominee, and as a
friendly compromise we suggested that we have a joint meeting of all the
societies and elect the speaker at this gathering; but this plan also
the men at first refused, giving in only after weeks of argument, during
which no one had time for the calmer pleasures of study. When the joint
meeting was finally held, nothing was accomplished; we girls had one
more member than the boys had, and we promptly re-elected our candidate,
who was as promptly declined by the boys. Two of our girls were engaged
to two of the boys, and it was secretly planned by our brother society
that during a second joint meeting these two men should take the girls
out for a drive and then slip back to vote, leaving the girls at some
point sufficiently remote from college. We discovered the plot, however,
in time to thwart it, and at last, when nothing but the unprecedented
tie-up had been discussed for months, the boys suddenly gave up their
candidate and nominated me for orator.

This was not at all what I wanted, and I immediately declined to serve.
We girls then nominated the young man who had been first choice of our
brother society, but he haughtily refused to accept the compliment.
The reunion was only a fortnight away, and the programme had not
been printed, so now the president took the situation in hand and
peremptorily ordered me to accept the nomination or be suspended. This
was a wholly unexpected boomerang. I had wished to make a good fight for
equal rights for the girls, and to impress the boys with the fact of our
existence as a society; but I had not desired to set the entire student
body by the ears nor to be forced to prepare and deliver an oration
at the eleventh hour. Moreover, I had no suitable gown to wear on so
important an occasion. One of my classmates, however, secretly wrote to
my sister, describing my blushing honors and explaining my need, and my
family rallied to the call. My father bought the material, and my
mother and Mary paid for the making of the gown. It was a white
alpaca creation, trimmed with satin, and the consciousness that it
was extremely becoming sustained me greatly during the mental agony of
preparing and delivering my oration. To my family that oration was the
redeeming episode of my early career. For the moment it almost made them
forget my crime of preaching.

My original fund of eighteen dollars was now supplemented by the
proceeds of a series of lectures I gave on temperance. The temperance
women were not yet organized, but they had their speakers, and I was
occasionally paid five dollars to hold forth for an hour or two in the
little country school-houses of our region. As a licensed preacher I
had no tuition fees to pay at college; but my board, in the home of the
president and his wife, was costing me four dollars a week, and this was
the limit of my expenses, as I did my own laundry-work. During my first
college year the amount I paid for amusement was exactly fifty cents;
that went for a lecture. The mental strain of the whole experience was
rather severe, for I never knew how much I would be able to earn; and
I was beginning to feel the effects of this when Christmas came and
brought with it a gift of ninety-two dollars, which Miss Foot had
collected among my Big Rapids friends. That, with what I could earn,
carried me through the year.

The following spring our brother James, who was now living in St.
Johnsbury, Vermont, invited my sister Mary and me to spend the summer
with him, and Mary and I finally dug a grave for our little hatchet and
went East together with something of our old-time joy in each other's
society. We reached St. Johnsbury one Saturday, and within an hour of
our arrival learned that my brother had arranged for me to preach in a
local church the following day. That threatened to spoil the visit for
Mary and even to disinter the hatchet! At first she positively refused
to go to hear me, but after a few hours of reflection she announced
gloomily that if she did not go I would not have my hair arranged
properly or get my hat on straight. Moved by this conviction, she joined
the family parade to the church, and later, in the sacristy, she pulled
me about and pinned me up to her heart's content. Then, reluctantly, she
went into the church and heard me preach. She offered no tributes after
our return to the house, but her protests ceased from that time, and we
gave each other the love and understanding which had marked our girlhood
days. The change made me very happy; for Mary was the salt of the earth,
and next only to my longing for my mother, I had longed for her in the
years of our estrangement.

Every Sunday that summer I preached in or near St. Johnsbury, and toward
autumn we had a big meeting which the ministers of all the surrounding
churches attended. I was asked to preach the sermon--a high
compliment--and I chose that important day to make a mistake in quoting
a passage from Scripture. I asked, "Can the Ethiopian change his spots
or the leopard his skin?" I realized at once that I had transposed the
words, and no doubt a look of horror dawned in my eyes; but I went on
without correcting myself and without the slightest pause. Later, one of
the ministers congratulated me on this presence of mind.

"If you had corrected yourself," he said, "all the young people would
have been giggling yet over the spotted nigger. Keep to your rule of
going right ahead!"

At the end of the summer the various churches in which I had preached
gave me a beautiful gold watch and one hundred dollars in money, and
with an exceedingly light heart I went back to college to begin my
second year of work.

From that time life was less complex. I had enough temperance-work and
preaching in the country school-houses and churches to pay my college
expenses, and, now that my financial anxieties were relieved, my health
steadily improved. Several times I preached to the Indians, and these
occasions were among the most interesting of my experiences. The squaws
invariably brought their babies with them, but they had a simple and
effective method of relieving themselves of the care of the infants
as soon as they reached the church. The papooses, who were strapped to
their boards, were hung like a garment on the back wall of the building
by a hole in the top of the board, which projected above their heads.
Each papoose usually had a bit of fat pork tied to the end of a string
fastened to its wrist, and with these sources of nourishment the
infants occupied themselves pleasantly while the sermon was in progress.
Frequently the pork slipped down the throat of the papoose, but the
struggle of the child and the jerking of its hands in the strangulation
that followed pulled the piece safely out again. As I faced the
congregation I also faced the papooses, to whom the indifferent backs
of their mothers were presented; it seemed to me there was never a time
when some papoose was not choking, but no matter how much excitement or
discomfort was going on among the babies, not one squaw turned her head
to look back at them. In that assemblage the emotions were not allowed
to interrupt the calm intellectual enjoyment of the sermon.

My most dramatic experience during this period occurred in the summer of
1874, when I went to a Northern lumber-camp to preach in the pulpit of
a minister who was away on his honeymoon. The stage took me within
twenty-two miles of my destination, to a place called Seberwing. To my
dismay, however, when I arrived at Seberwing, Saturday evening, I found
that the rest of the journey lay through a dense woods, and that I could
reach my pulpit in time the next morning only by having some one drive
me through the woods that night. It was not a pleasant prospect, for
I had heard appalling tales of the stockades in this region and of the
women who were kept prisoners there. But to miss the engagement was not
to be thought of, and when, after I had made several vain efforts to
find a driver, a man appeared in a two-seated wagon and offered to take
me to my destination, I felt that I had to go with him, though I did not
like his appearance. He was a huge, muscular person, with a protruding
jaw and a singularly evasive eye; but I reflected that his forbidding
expression might be due, in part at least, to the prospect of the long
night drive through the woods, to which possibly he objected as much as
I did.

It was already growing dark when we started, and within a few moments we
were out of the little settlement and entering the woods. With me I
had a revolver I had long since learned to use, but which I very rarely
carried. I had hesitated to bring it now--had even left home without it;
and then, impelled by some impulse I never afterward ceased to bless,
had returned for it and dropped it into my hand-bag.

I sat on the back seat of the wagon, directly behind the driver, and for
a time, as we entered the darkening woods, his great shoulders blotted
out all perspective as he drove on in stolid silence. Then, little by
little, they disappeared like a rapidly fading negative. The woods were
filled with Norway pines, hemlocks, spruce, and tamaracks-great, somber
trees that must have shut out the light even on the brightest days.
To-night the heavens held no lamps aloft to guide us, and soon the
darkness folded around us like a garment. I could see neither the driver
nor his horses. I could hear only the sibilant whisper of the trees and
the creak of our slow wheels in the rough forest road.

Suddenly the driver began to talk, and at first I was glad to hear the
reassuring human tones, for the experience had begun to seem like a bad
dream. I replied readily, and at once regretted that I had done so,
for the man's choice of topics was most unpleasant. He began to tell me
stories of the stockades--grim stories with horrible details, repeated
so fully and with such gusto that I soon realized he was deliberately
affronting my ears. I checked him and told him I could not listen to
such talk.

He replied with a series of oaths and shocking vulgarities, stopping his
horses that he might turn and fling the words into my face. He ended
by snarling that I must think him a fool to imagine he did not know
the kind of woman I was. What was I doing in that rough country, he
demanded, and why was I alone with him in those black woods at night?

Though my heart missed a beat just then, I tried to answer him calmly.

"You know perfectly well who I am," I reminded him. "And you understand
that I am making this journey to-night because I am to preach to-morrow
morning and there is no other way to keep my appointment."

He uttered a laugh which was a most unpleasant sound.

"Well," he said, coolly, "I'm damned if I'll take you. I've got you
here, and I'm going to keep you here!"

I slipped my hand into the satchel in my lap, and it touched my
revolver. No touch of human fingers ever brought such comfort. With a
deep breath of thanksgiving I drew it out and cocked it, and as I did so
he recognized the sudden click.

"Here! What have you got there?" he snapped.

"I have a revolver," I replied, as steadily as I could. "And it is
cocked and aimed straight at your back. Now drive on. If you stop again,
or speak, I'll shoot you."

For an instant or two he blustered.

"By God," he cried, "you wouldn't dare."

"Wouldn't I?" I asked. "Try me by speaking just once more."

Even as I spoke I felt my hair rise on my scalp with the horror of the
moment, which seemed worse than any nightmare a woman could experience.
But the man was conquered by the knowledge of the waiting, willing
weapon just behind him. He laid his whip savagely on the backs of his
horses and they responded with a leap that almost knocked me out of the
wagon.

The rest of the night was a black terror I shall never forget. He did
not speak again, nor stop, but I dared not relax my caution for an
instant. Hour after hour crawled toward day, and still I sat in the
unpierced darkness, the revolver ready. I knew he was inwardly raging,
and that at any instant he might make a sudden jump and try to get the
revolver away from me. I decided that at his slightest movement I must
shoot. But dawn came at last, and just as its bluish light touched the
dark tips of the pines we drove up to the log hotel in the settlement
that was our destination. Here my driver spoke.

"Get down," he said, gruffly. "This is the place."

I sat still. Even yet I dared not trust him. Moreover, I was so stiff
after my vigil that I was not sure I could move.

"You get down," I directed, "and wake up the landlord. Bring him out
here."

He sullenly obeyed and aroused the hotel-owner, and when the latter
appeared I climbed out of the wagon with some effort but without
explanation. That morning I preached in my friend's pulpit as I had
promised to do, and the rough building was packed to its doors with
lumbermen who had come in from the neighboring camp. Their appearance
caused great surprise, as they had never attended a service before.
They formed a most picturesque congregation, for they all wore brilliant
lumber-camp clothing--blue or red shirts with yellow scarfs twisted
around their waists, and gay-colored jackets and logging-caps. There
were forty or fifty of them, and when we took up our collection they
responded with much liberality and cheerful shouts to one another.

"Put in fifty cents!" they yelled across the church. "Give her a
dollar!"

The collection was the largest that had been taken up in the history of
the settlement, but I soon learned that it was not the spiritual comfort
I offered which had appealed to the lumber-men. My driver of the
night before, who was one of their number, had told his pals of his
experience, and the whole camp had poured into town to see the woman
minister who carried a revolver.

"Her sermon?" said one of them to my landlord, after the meeting. "Huh!
I dunno what she preached. But, say, don't make no mistake about one
thing: the little preacher has sure got grit!"




IV. THE WOLF AT THE DOOR

When I returned to Albion College in the autumn of 1875 I brought with
me a problem which tormented me during my waking hours and chattered on
my pillow at night. Should I devote two more years of my vanishing
youth to the completion of my college course, or, instead, go at once
to Boston University, enter upon my theological studies, take my degree,
and be about my Father's business?

I was now twenty-seven years old, and I had been a licensed preacher for
three years. My reputation in the Northwest was growing, and by sermons
and lectures I could certainly earn enough to pay the expenses of the
full college course. On the other hand, Boston was a new world. There I
would be alone and practically penniless, and the opportunities for work
might be limited. Quite possibly in my final two years at Albion I could
even save enough money to make the experience in Boston less difficult,
and the clear common sense I had inherited from my mother reminded me
that in this course lay wisdom. Possibly it was some inheritance from my
visionary father which made me, at the end of three months, waive these
sage reflections, pack my few possessions, and start for Boston, where I
entered the theological school of the university in February, 1876.

It was an instance of stepping off a solid plank and into space; and
though there is exhilaration in the sensation, as I discovered then and
at later crises in life when I did the same thing, there was also an
amount of subsequent discomfort for which even my lively imagination
had not prepared me. I went through some grim months in Boston--months
during which I learned what it was to go to bed cold and hungry, to
wake up cold and hungry, and to have no knowledge of how long these
conditions might continue. But not more than once or twice during the
struggle there, and then only for an hour or two in the physical and
mental depression attending malnutrition, did I regret coming. At that
period of my life I believed that the Lord had my small personal affairs
very much on His mind. If I starved and froze it was His test of my
worthiness for the ministry, and if He had really chosen me for one of
His servants, He would see me through. The faith that sustained me
then has still a place in my life, and existence without it would be an
infinitely more dreary affair than it is. But I admit that I now call
upon the Lord less often and less imperatively than I did before the
stern years taught me my unimportance in the great scheme of things.

My class at the theological school was composed of forty-two young men
and my unworthy self, and before I had been a member of it an hour I
realized that women theologians paid heavily for the privilege of being
women. The young men of my class who were licensed preachers were given
free accommodations in the dormitory, and their board, at a club formed
for their assistance, cost each of them only one dollar and twenty-five
cents a week. For me no such kindly provision was made. I was not
allowed a place in the dormitory, but instead was given two dollars a
week to pay the rent of a room outside. Neither was I admitted to the
economical comforts of the club, but fed myself according to my income,
a plan which worked admirably when there was an income, but left an
obvious void when there was not.

With characteristic optimism, however, I hired a little attic room on
Tremont Street and established myself therein. In lieu of a window
the room offered a pale skylight to the February storms, and there
was neither heat in it nor running water; but its possession gave me a
pleasant sense of proprietorship, and the whole experience seemed a high
adventure. I at once sought opportunities to preach and lecture, but
these were even rarer than firelight and food. In Albion I had been
practically the only licensed preacher available for substitute and
special work. In Boston University's three theological classes there
were a hundred men, each snatching eagerly at the slightest possibility
of employment; and when, despite this competition, I received and
responded to an invitation to preach, I never knew whether I was to be
paid for my services in cash or in compliments. If, by a happy chance,
the compensation came in cash, the amount was rarely more than five
dollars, and never more than ten. There was no help in sight from my
family, whose early opposition to my career as a minister had hotly
flamed forth again when I started East. I lived, therefore, on milk and
crackers, and for weeks at a time my hunger was never wholly satisfied.
In my home in the wilderness I had often heard the wolves prowling
around our door at night. Now, in Boston, I heard them even at high
noon.

There is a special and almost indescribable depression attending such
conditions. No one who has not experienced the combination of continued
cold, hunger, and loneliness in a great, strange, indifferent city can
realize how it undermines the victim's nerves and even tears at the
moral fiber. The self-humiliation I experienced was also intense. I had
worked my way in the Northwest; why could I not work my way in Boston?
Was there, perhaps, some lack in me and in my courage? Again and again
these questions rose in my mind and poisoned my self-confidence. The
one comfort I had in those black days was the knowledge that no
one suspected the depth of the abyss in which I dwelt. We were
all struggling; to the indifferent glance--and all glances were
indifferent--my struggle was no worse than that of my classmates whose
rooms and frugal meals were given them.

After a few months of this existence I was almost ready to believe that
the Lord's work for me lay outside of the ministry, and while this fear
was gripping me a serious crisis came in my financial affairs. The day
dawned when I had not a cent, nor any prospect of earning one. My stock
of provisions consisted of a box of biscuit, and my courage was flowing
from me like blood from an opened vein. Then came one of the quick turns
of the wheel of chance which make for optimism. Late in the afternoon
I was asked to do a week of revival work with a minister in a local
church, and when I accepted his invitation I mentally resolved to let
that week decide my fate. My shoes had burst open at the sides; for lack
of car-fare I had to walk to and from the scene of my meetings, though I
had barely strength for the effort. If my week of work brought me enough
to buy a pair of cheap shoes and feed me for a few days I would, I
decided, continue my theological course. If it did not, I would give up
the fight.

Never have I worked harder or better than during those seven days, when
I put into the effort not only my heart and soul, but the last flame of
my dying vitality, We had a rousing revival--one of the good old-time
affairs when the mourners' benches were constantly filled and the air
resounded with alleluias. The excitement and our success, mildly aided
by the box of biscuit, sustained me through the week, and not until
the last night did I realize how much of me had gone into this final
desperate charge of mine. Then, the service over and the people
departed, I sank, weak and trembling, into a chair, trying to pull
myself together before hearing my fate in the good-night words of the
minister I had assisted. When he came to me and began to compliment me
on the work I had done, I could not rise. I sat still and listened with
downcast eyes, afraid to lift them lest he read in them something of my
need and panic in this moment when my whole future seemed at stake.

At first his words rolled around the empty church as if they were
trying to get away from me, but at last I began to catch them. I was, it
seemed, a most desirable helper. It had been a privilege and a pleasure
to be associated with me. Beyond doubt, I would go far in my career.
He heartily wished that he could reward me adequately. I deserved fifty
dollars.

My tired heart fluttered at this. Probably my empty stomach fluttered,
too; but in the next moment something seemed to catch my throat and stop
my breath. For it appeared that, notwithstanding the enthusiasm and
the spiritual uplift of the week, the collections had been very
disappointing and the expenses unusually heavy. He could not give me
fifty dollars. He could not give me anything at all. He thanked me
warmly and wished me good night.

I managed to answer him and to get to my feet, but that journey down the
aisle from my chair to the church door was the longest journey I have
ever made. During it I felt not only the heart-sick disappointment of
the moment, but the cumulative unhappiness of the years to come. I was
friendless, penniless, and starving, but it was not of these conditions
that I thought then. The one overwhelming fact was that I had been
weighed and found wanting. I was not worthy.

I stumbled along, passing blindly a woman who stood on the street near
the church entrance. She stopped me, timidly, and held out her hand.
Then suddenly she put her arms around me and wept. She was an old lady,
and I did not know her, but it seemed fitting that she should cry just
then, as it would have seemed fitting to me if at that black moment all
the people on the earth had broken into sudden wailing.

"Oh, Miss Shaw," she said, "I'm the happiest woman in the world, and I
owe my happiness to you. To-night you have converted my grandson. He's
all I have left, but he has been a wild boy, and I've prayed over him
for years. Hereafter he is going to lead a different life. He has just
given me his promise on his knees."

Her hand fumbled in her purse.

"I am a poor woman," she went on, "but I have enough, and I want to make
you a little present. I know how hard life is for you young students."

She pressed a bill into my fingers. "It's very little," she said,
humbly; "it is only five dollars."

I laughed, and in that exultant moment I seemed to hear life laughing
with me. With the passing of the bill from her hand to mine existence
had become a new experience, wonderful and beautiful.

"It's the biggest gift I have ever had," I told her. "This little bill
is big enough to carry my future on its back!"

I had a good meal that night, and I bought the shoes the next morning.
Infinitely more sustaining than the food, however, was the conviction
that the Lord was with me and had given me a sign of His approval. The
experience was the turning-point of my theological career. When the
money was gone I succeeded in obtaining more work from time to time--and
though the grind was still cruelly hard, I never again lost hope. The
theological school was on Bromfield Street, and we students climbed
three flights of stairs to reach our class-rooms. Through lack of proper
food I had become too weak to ascend these stairs without sitting down
once or twice to rest, and within a month after my experience with the
appreciative grandmother I was discovered during one of these resting
periods by Mrs. Barrett, the superintendent of the Woman's Foreign
Missionary Society, which had offices in our building. She stopped,
looked me over, and then invited me into her room, where she asked me
if I felt ill. I assured her that I did not. She asked a great many
additional questions and, little by little, under the womanly sympathy
of them, my reserve broke down and she finally got at the truth, which
until that hour I had succeeded in concealing. She let me leave without
much comment, but the next day she again invited me into her office and
came directly to the purpose of the interview.

"Miss Shaw," she said, "I have been talking to a friend of mine about
you, and she would like to make a bargain with you. She thinks you are
working too hard. She will pay you three dollars and a half a week
for the rest of this school year if you will promise to give up your
preaching. She wants you to rest, study, and take care of your health."

I asked the name of my unknown friend, but Mrs. Barrett said that was to
remain a secret. She had been given a check for seventy-eight dollars,
and from this, she explained, my allowance would be paid in weekly
instalments. I took the money very gratefully, and a few years later I
returned the amount to the Missionary Society; but I never learned the
identity of my benefactor. Her three dollars and a half a week, added to
the weekly two dollars I was allowed for room rent, at once solved the
problem of living; and now that meal-hours had a meaning in my life, my
health improved and my horizon brightened. I spent most of my evenings
in study, and my Sundays in the churches of Phillips Brooks and James
Freeman Clark, my favorite ministers. Also, I joined the university's
praying-band of students, and took part in the missionary-work among the
women of the streets. I had never forgotten my early friend in Lawrence,
the beautiful "mysterious lady" who had loved me as a child, and, in
memory of her, I set earnestly about the effort to help unfortunates of
her class. I went into the homes of these women, followed them to the
streets and the dance-halls, talked to them, prayed with them, and
made friends among them. Some of them I was able to help, but many were
beyond help; and I soon learned that the effective work in that field is
the work which is done for women before, not after, they have fallen.

During my vacation in the summer of 1876 I went to Cape Cod and earned
my expenses by substituting in local pulpits. Here, at East Dennis, I
formed the friendship which brought me at once the greatest happiness
and the deepest sorrow of that period of my life. My new friend was
a widow whose name was Persis Addy, and she was also the daughter of
Captain Prince Crowell, then the most prominent man in the Cape Cod
community--a bank president, a railroad director, and a citizen of
wealth, as wealth was rated in those days. When I returned to the
theological school in the autumn Mrs. Addy came to Boston with me, and
from that time until her death, two years later, we lived together. She
was immensely interested in my work, and the friendly part she took in
it diverted her mind from the bereavement over which she had brooded for
years, while to me her coming opened windows into a new world. I was
no longer lonely; and though in my life with her I paid my way to
the extent of my small income, she gave me my first experience of
an existence in which comfort and culture, recreation, and leisurely
reading were cheerful commonplaces. For the first time I had some one
to come home to, some one to confide in, some one to talk to, listen
to, and love. We read together and went to concerts together; and it was
during this winter that I attended my first theatrical performance. The
star was Mary Anderson, in "Pygmalion and Galatea," and play and player
charmed me so utterly that I saw them every night that week, sitting
high in the gallery and enjoying to the utmost the unfolding of this new
delight. It was so glowing a pleasure that I longed to make some return
to the giver of it; but not until many years afterward, when I met
Madame Navarro in London, was I able to tell her what the experience had
been and to thank her for it.

I did not long enjoy the glimpses into my new world, for soon, and
most tragically, it was closed to me. In the spring following our first
Boston winter together Mrs. Addy and I went to Hingham, Massachusetts,
where I had been appointed temporary pastor of the Methodist Church.
There Mrs. Addy was taken ill, and as she grew steadily worse we
returned to Boston to live near the best available physicians, who for
months theorized over her malady without being able to diagnose it. At
last her father, Captain Crowell, sent to Paris for Dr. Brown-Sequard,
then the most distinguished specialist of his day, and Dr.
Brown-Sequard, when he arrived and examined his patient, discovered that
she had a tumor on the brain. She had had a great shock in her life--the
tragic death of her husband at sea during their wedding tour around
the world--and it was believed that her disease dated from that time.
Nothing could be done for her, and she failed daily during our second
year together, and died in March, 1878, just before I finished my
theological course and while I was still temporary pastor of the church
at Hingham. Every moment I could take from my parish and my studies I
spent with her, and those were sorrowful months. In her poor, tortured
brain the idea formed that I, not she, was the sick person in our family
of two, and when we were at home together she insisted that I must lie
down and let her nurse me; then for hours she brooded over me, trying to
relieve the agony she believed I was experiencing. When at last she was
at peace her father and I took her home to Cape Cod and laid her in the
graveyard of the little church where we had met at the beginning of our
brief and beautiful friendship; and the subsequent loneliness I felt
was far greater than any I had ever suffered in the past, for now I had
learned the meaning of companionship.

Three months after Mrs. Addy's death I graduated. She had planned
to take me abroad, and during our first winter together we had spent
countless hours talking and dreaming of our European wanderings. When
she found that she must die she made her will and left me fifteen
hundred dollars for the visit to Europe, insisting that I must carry out
the plan we had made; and during her conscious periods she constantly
talked of this and made me promise that I would go. After her death it
seemed to me that to go without her was impossible. Everything of beauty
I looked upon would hold memories of her, keeping fresh my sorrow and
emphasizing my loneliness; but it was her last expressed desire that I
should go, and I went.

First, however, I had graduated--clad in a brandnew black silk gown, and
with five dollars in my pocket, which I kept there during the graduation
exercises. I felt a special satisfaction in the possession of that
money, for, notwithstanding the handicap of being a woman, I was said to
be the only member of my class who had worked during the entire course,
graduated free from debt, and had a new outfit as well as a few dollars
in cash.

I graduated without any special honors. Possibly I might have won
some if I had made the effort, but my graduation year, as I have just
explained, had been very difficult. As it was, I was merely a good
average student, feeling my isolation as the only woman in my class,
but certainly not spurring on my men associates by the display of any
brilliant gifts. Naturally, I missed a great deal of class fellowship
and class support, and throughout my entire course I rarely entered my
class-room without the abysmal conviction that I was not really wanted
there. But some of the men were goodhumoredly cordial, and several of
them are among my friends to-day. Between myself and my family there
still existed the breach I had created when I began to preach. With the
exception of Mary and James, my people openly regarded me, during my
theological course, as a dweller in outer darkness, and even my mother's
love was clouded by what she felt to be my deliberate and persistent
flouting of her wishes.

Toward the end of my university experience, however, an incident
occurred which apparently changed my mother's viewpoint. She was
now living with my sister Mary, in Big Rapids, Michigan, and, on the
occasion of one of my rare and brief visits to them I was invited to
preach in the local church. Here, for the first time, my mother heard
me. Dutifully escorted by one of my brothers, she attended church that
morning in a state of shivering nervousness. I do not know what she
expected me to do or say, but toward the end of the sermon it
became clear that I had not justified her fears. The look of intense
apprehension left her eyes, her features relaxed into placidity, and
later in the day she paid me the highest compliment I had yet received
from a member of my family.

"I liked the sermon very much," she peacefully told my brother. "Anna
didn't say anything about hell, or about anything else!"

When we laughed at this handsome tribute, she hastened to qualify it.

"What I mean," she explained, "is that Anna didn't say anything
objectionable in the pulpit!" And with this recognition I was content.

Between the death of my friend and my departure for Europe I buried
myself in the work of the university and of my little church; and as if
in answer to the call of my need, Mary E. Livermore, who had given me
the first professional encouragement I had ever received, re-entered my
life. Her husband, like myself, was pastor of a church in Hingham, and
whenever his finances grew low, or there was need of a fund for some
special purpose--conditions that usually exist in a small church--his
brilliant wife came to his assistance and raised the money, while her
husband retired modestly to the background and regarded her with adoring
eyes. On one of these occasions, I remember, when she entered the pulpit
to preach her sermon, she dropped her bonnet and coat on an unoccupied
chair. A little later there was need of this chair, and Mr. Livermore,
who sat under the pulpit, leaned forward, picked up the garments, and,
without the least trace of selfconsciousness, held them in his lap
throughout the sermon. One of the members of the church, who appeared
to be irritated by the incident, later spoke of it to him and added,
sardonically, "How does it feel to be merely 'Mrs. Livermore's
husband'?"

In reply Mr. Livermore flashed on him one of his charming smiles. "Why,
I'm very proud of it," he said, with the utmost cheerfulness. "You see,
I'm the only man in the world who has that distinction."

They were a charming couple, the Livermores, and they deserved far more
than they received from a world to which they gave so freely and so
richly. To me, as to others, they were more than kind; and I never
recall them without a deep feeling of gratitude and an equally deep
sense of loss in their passing.

It was during this period, also, that I met Frances E. Willard. There
was a great Moody revival in progress in Boston, and Miss Willard was
the righthand assistant of Mr. Moody. To her that revival must have been
marked with a star, for during it she met for the first time Miss Anna
Gordon, who became her life-long friend and her biographer. The meetings
also laid the foundation of our friendship, and for many years Miss
Willard and I were closely associated in work and affection.

On the second or third night of the revival, during one of the "mixed
meetings," attended by both women and men, Mr. Moody invited those who
were willing to talk to sinners to come to the front. I went down the
aisle with others, and found a seat near Miss Willard, to whom I was
then introduced by some one who knew us both. I wore my hair short in
those days, and I had a little fur cap on my head. Though I had been
preaching for several years, I looked absurdly young--far too young, it
soon became evident, to interest Mr. Moody. He was already moving about
among the men and women who had responded to his invitation, and one by
one he invited them to speak, passing me each time until at last I
was left alone. Then he took pity on me and came to my side to whisper
kindly that I had misunderstood his invitation. He did not want young
girls to talk to his people, he said, but mature women with worldly
experience. He advised me to go home to my mother, adding, to soften the
blow, that some time in the future when there were young girls at the
meeting I could come and talk to them.

I made no explanations to him, but started to leave, and Miss Willard,
who saw me departing, followed and stopped me. She asked why I was
going, and I told her that Mr. Moody had sent me home to grow.
Frances Willard had a keen sense of humor, and she enjoyed the joke so
thoroughly that she finally convinced me it was amusing, though at
first the humor of it had escaped me. She took me back to Mr. Moody and
explained the situation to him, and he apologized and put me to work.
He said he had thought I was about sixteen. After that I occasionally
helped him in the intervals of my other work.

The time had come to follow Mrs. Addy's wishes and go to Europe, and I
sailed in the month of June following my graduation, and traveled
for three months with a party of tourists under the direction of Eben
Tourgee, of the Boston Conservatory of Music. We landed in Glasgow, and
from there went to England, Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, and
last of all to Italy. Our company included many clergymen and a
never-to-be-forgotten widow whose light-hearted attitude toward the
memory of her departed spouse furnished the comedy of our first voyage.
It became a pet diversion to ask her if her husband still lived, for she
always answered the question in the same mournful words, and with the
same manner of irrepressible gaiety.

"Oh no!" she would chirp. "My dear departed has been in our Heavenly
Father's house for the past eight years!"

At its best, the vacation without my friend was tragically incomplete,
and only a few of its incidents stand out with clearness across the
forty-six years that have passed since then. One morning, I remember, I
preached an impromptu sermon in the Castle of Heidelberg before a large
gathering; and a little later, in Genoa, I preached a very different
sermon to a wholly different congregation. There was a gospel-ship in
the harbor, and one Saturday the pastor of it came ashore to ask if
some American clergyman in our party would preach on his ship the next
morning. He was an old-time, orthodox Presbyterian, and from the tips
of his broad-soled shoes to the severe part in the hair above his
sanctimonious brow he looked the type. I was not present when he called
at our hotel, and my absence gave my fellow-clergymen an opportunity to
play a joke on the gentleman from the gospel-ship. They assured him that
"Dr. Shaw" would preach for him, and the pastor returned to his post
greatly pleased. When they told me of his invitation, however, they did
not add that they had neglected to tell him Dr. Shaw was a woman, and I
was greatly elated by the compliment I thought had been paid me.

Our entire party of thirty went out to the gospelship the next morning,
and when the pastor came to meet us, lank and forbidding, his austere
lips vainly trying to curve into a smile of welcome, they introduced me
to him as the minister who was to deliver the sermon. He had just taken
my hand; he dropped it as if it had burned his own. For a moment he had
no words to meet the crisis. Then he stuttered something to the effect
that the situation was impossible that his men would not listen to a
woman, that they would mob her, that it would be blasphemous for a woman
to preach. My associates, who had so light-heartedly let me in for this
unpleasant experience, now realized that they must see me through it.
They persuaded him to allow me to preach the sermon.

With deep reluctance the pastor finally accepted me and the situation;
but when the moment came to introduce me, he devoted most of his time to
heartfelt apologies for my presence. He explained to the sailors that
I was a woman, and fervidly assured them that he himself was not
responsible for my appearance there. With every word he uttered he put a
brick in the wall he was building between me and the crew, until at last
I felt that I could never get past it. I was very unhappy, very lonely,
very homesick; and suddenly the thought came to me that these men,
notwithstanding their sullen eyes and forbidding faces, might be lonely
and homesick, too. I decided to talk to them as a woman and not as a
minister, and I came down from the pulpit and faced them on their own
level, looking them over and mentally selecting the hardest specimens of
the lot as the special objects of my appeal. One old fellow, who
looked like a pirate with his red-rimmed eyes, weather-beaten skin,
and fimbriated face, grinned up at me in such sardonic challenge that I
walked directly in front of him and began to speak. I said:

"My friends, I hope you will forget everything Dr. Blank has just said.
It is true that I am a minister, and that I came here to preach. But now
I do not intend to preach--only to have a friendly talk, on a text which
is not in the Bible. I am very far from home, and I feel as homesick as
some of you men look. So my text is, 'Blessed are the homesick, for they
shall go home.'"

In my summers at Cape Cod I had learned something about sailors. I knew
that in the inprepossessing congregation before me there were many boys
who had run away from home, and men who had left home because of family
troubles. I talked to the young men first, to those who had forgotten
their mothers and thought their mothers had forgotten them, and I told
of my experiences with waiting, heavy-hearted mothers who had sons at
sea. Some heads went down at that, and here and there I saw a boy gulp,
but the old fellow I was particularly anxious to move still grinned up
at me like a malicious monkey. Then I talked of the sailor's wife, and
of her double burden of homemaking and anxiety, and soon I could pick
out some of the husbands by their softened faces. But still my old
man grinned and squinted. Last of all I described the whalers who were
absent from home for years, and who came back to find their children and
their grandchildren waiting for them. I told how I had seen them, in our
New England coast towns, covered, as a ship is covered with barnacles,
by grandchildren who rode on their shoulders and sat astride of their
necks as they walked down the village streets. And now at last the sneer
left my old man's loose lips. He had grandchildren somewhere. He
twisted uneasily in his seat, coughed, and finally took out a big red
handkerchief and wiped his eyes. The episode encouraged me.

"When I came here," I added, "I intended to preach a sermon on 'The
Heavenly Vision.' Now I want to give you a glimpse of that in addition
to the vision we have had of home."

I ended with a bit of the sermon and a prayer, and when I raised my head
the old man of the sardonic grin was standing before me.

"Missus," he said in a husky whisper, "I'd like to shake your hand."

I took his hard old fist, and then, seeing that many of the other
sailors were beginning to move hospitably but shyly toward me, I said:

"I would like to shake hands with every man here."

At the words they surged forward, and the affair became a reception,
during which I shook hands with every sailor of my congregation. The
next day my hand was swollen out of shape, for the sailors had gripped
it as if they were hauling on a hawser; but the experience was worth
the discomfort. The best moment of the morning came, however, when the
pastor of the ship faced me, goggle-eyed and marveling.

"I wouldn't have believed it," was all he could say. "I thought the men
would mob you."

"Why should they mob me?" I wanted to know.

"Why," he stammered, "because the thing is so--so--unnatural."

"Well," I said, "if it is unnatural for women to talk to men, we have
been living in an unnatural world for a long time. Moreover, if it is
unnatural, why did Jesus send a woman out as the first preacher?"

He waived a discussion of that question by inviting us all to his cabin
to drink wine with him--and as we were "total abstainers," it seemed
as unnatural to us to have him offer us wine as a woman's preaching had
seemed to him.

The next European incident on which memory throws a high-light was
our audience with Pope Leo XIII. As there were several distinguished
Americans in our party, a private audience was arranged for us, and for
days before the time appointed we nervously rehearsed the etiquette of
the occasion. When we reached the Vatican we were marched between rows
of Swiss Guards to the Throne Room, only to learn there that we were
to be received in the Tapestry Room. Here we found a very impressive
assemblage of cardinals and Vatican officials, and while we were still
lost in the beauty of the picture they made against the room's
superb background, the approach of the Pope was announced. Every
one immediately knelt, except a few persons who tried to show their
democracy by standing; but I am sure that even these individuals felt a
thrill when the slight, exquisite figure appeared at the door and gave
us a general benediction. Then the Pope passed slowly down the line,
offering his hand to each of us, and radiating a charm so gracious
and so human that few failed to respond to the appeal of his engaging
personality. There was nothing fleshly about Leo XIII. His body was so
frail, so wraithlike, that one almost expected to see through it the
magnificent tapestries on the walls. But from the moment he appeared
every eye clung to him, every thought was concentrated upon him. This
effect I think he would have produced even if he had come among us
unrecognized, for through the thin shell that housed it shone the steady
flame of a wonderful spirit.

I had previously remarked to my friends that kissing the Pope's
ring after so many other lips had touched it did not appeal to me
as hygienic, and that I intended to kiss his hand instead. When my
opportunity came I kept my word; but after I had kissed the venerable
hand I remained kneeling for an instant with bowed head, a little aghast
at my daring. The gentle Father thought, however, that I was waiting
for a special blessing. He gave it to me gravely and passed on, and I
devoted the next few hours to ungodly crowing over the associates who
had received no such individual attention.

In Venice we attended the great fete celebrating the first visit of
King Humbert and Queen Margherita. It was also the first time Venice had
entertained a queen since the Italian union, and the sea-queen of
the Adriatic outdid herself in the gorgeousness and the beauty of her
preparations. The Grand Canal was like a flowing rainbow, reflecting
the brilliant decorations on every side, and at night the moonlight, the
music, the chiming church-bells, the colored lanterns, the gay voices,
the lapping waters against the sides of countless gondolas made the
experience seem like a dream of a new and unbelievably beautiful world.
Forty thousand persons were gathered in the Square of St. Mark and
in front of the Palace, and I recall a pretty incident in which the
gracious Queen and a little street urchin figured. The small, ragged
boy had crept as close to the royal balcony as he dared, and then,
unobserved, had climbed up one of its pillars. At the moment when a
sudden hush had fallen on the crowd this infant, overcome by patriotism
and a glimpse of the royal lady on the balcony above him, suddenly piped
up shrilly in the silence. "Long live the Queen!" he cried. "Long live
the Queen!"

The gracious Margherita heard the childish voice, and, amused and
interested, leaned over the balcony to see where it came from. What she
saw doubtless touched the mother-heart in her. She caught the eye of
the tattered urchin clinging to the pillar, and radiantly smiled on him.
Then, probably thinking that the King was absorbing the attention of
the great assemblage, she indulged in a little diversion. Leaning
far forward, she kissed the tip of her lace handkerchief and swept
it caressingly across the boy's brown cheek, smiling down at him as
unconsciously as if she and the enraptured youngster were alone together
in the world. The next instant she had straightened up and flushed, for
the watchful crowd had seen the episode and was wild with enthusiasm.
For ten minutes the people cheered the Queen without ceasing, and for
the next few days they talked of little but the spontaneous, girlish
action which had delighted them all.

One more sentimental record, and I shall have reached another
mile-stone. As I have said, my friend Mrs. Addy left me in her will
fifteen hundred dollars for my visit to Europe, and before I sailed
her father, who was one of the best friends I have ever had, made a
characteristically kind proposition in connection with the little fund.
Instead of giving me the money, he gave me two railroad bonds, one
for one thousand dollars, the other for five hundred dollars, and each
drawing seven per cent. interest. He suggested that I deposit these
bonds in the bank of which he was president, and borrow from the bank
the money to go abroad. Then, when I returned and went into my new
parish, I could use some of my salary every month toward repaying the
loan. These monthly payments, he explained, could be as small as I
wished, but each month the interest on the amount I paid would cease.
I gladly took his advice and borrowed seven hundred dollars. After
I returned from Europe I repaid the loan in monthly instalments, and
eventually got my bonds, which I still own. They will mature in 1916.
I have had one hundred and five dollars a year from them, in interest,
ever since I received them in 1878--more than twice as much interest
as their face value--and every time I have gone abroad I have used this
interest toward paying my passage. Thus my friend has had a share in
each of the many visits I have made to Europe, and in all of them her
memory has been vividly with me.

With my return from Europe my real career as a minister began. The year
in the pulpit at Hingham had been merely tentative, and though I had
succeeded in building up the church membership to four times what it had
been when I took charge, I was not reappointed. I had paid off a small
church debt, and had had the building repaired, painted, and carpeted.
Now that it was out of its difficulties it offered some advantages to
the occupant of its pulpit, and of these my successor, a man, received
the benefit. I, however, had small ground for complaint, for I was at
once offered and accepted the pastorate of a church at East Dennis, Cape
Cod. Here I went in October, 1878, and here I spent seven of the most
interesting years of my life.




V. SHEPHERD OF A DIVIDED FLOCK

On my return from Europe, as I have said, I took up immediately and most
buoyantly the work of my new parish. My previous occupation of various
pulpits, whether long or short, had always been in the role of a
substitute. Now, for the first time, I had a church of my own, and was
to stand or fall by the record made in it. The ink was barely dry on
my diploma from the Boston Theological School, and, as it happened,
the little church to which I was called was in the hands of two warring
factions, whose battles furnished the most fervid interest of the Cape
Cod community. But my inexperience disturbed me not at all, and I was
blissfully ignorant of the division in the congregation. So I entered my
new field as trustfully as a child enters a garden; and though I was
in trouble from the beginning, and resigned three times in startling
succession, I ended by remaining seven years.

My appointment did not cause even a lull in the warfare among my
parishioners. Before I had crossed the threshold of my church I was
made to realize that I was shepherd of a divided flock. Exactly what
had caused the original breach I never learned; but it had widened with
time, until it seemed that no peacemaker could build a bridge large
enough to span it. As soon as I arrived in East Dennis each faction
tried to pour into my ears its bitter criticisms of the other, but I
made and consistently followed the safe rule of refusing to listen to
either side, I announced publicly that I would hear no verbal charges
whatever, but that if my two flocks would state their troubles in
writing I would call a board meeting to discuss and pass upon them. This
they both resolutely refused to do (it was apparently the first time
they had ever agreed on any point); and as I steadily declined to listen
to complaints, they devised an original method of putting them before
me.

During the regular Thursday-night prayer-meeting, held about two weeks
after my arrival, and at which, of course, I presided, they voiced their
difficulties in public prayer, loudly and urgently calling upon the Lord
to pardon such and such a liar, mentioning the gentleman by name, and
such and such a slanderer, whose name was also submitted. By the time
the prayers were ended there were few untarnished reputations in the
congregation, and I knew, perforce, what both sides had to say.

The following Thursday night they did the same thing, filling their
prayers with intimate and surprising details of one another's history,
and I endured the situation solely because I did not know how to meet
it. I was still young, and my theological course had set no guide-posts
on roads as new as these. To interfere with souls in their communion
with God seemed impossible; to let them continue to utter personal
attacks in church, under cover of prayer, was equally impossible. Any
course I could follow seemed to lead away from my new parish, yet both
duty and pride made prompt action necessary. By the time we gathered
for the third prayermeeting I had decided what to do, and before the
services began I rose and addressed my erring children. I explained that
the character of the prayers at our recent meetings was making us the
laughingstock of the community, that unbelievers were ridiculing our
religion, and that the discipline of the church was being wrecked; and I
ended with these words, each of which I had carefully weighed:

"Now one of two things must happen. Either you will stop this kind
of praying, or you will remain away from our meetings. We will hold
prayermeetings on another night, and I shall refuse admission to any
among you who bring personal criticisms into your public prayers."

As I had expected it to do, the announcement created an immediate
uproar. Both factions sprang to their feet, trying to talk at once. The
storm raged until I dismissed the congregation, telling the members that
their conduct was an insult to the Lord, and that I would not listen to
either their protests or their prayers. They went unwillingly, but they
went; and the excitement the next day raised the sick from their beds to
talk of it, and swept the length and breadth of Cape Cod. The following
Sunday the little church held the largest attendance in its history.
Seemingly, every man and woman in town had come to hear what more I
would say about the trouble, but I ignored the whole matter. I preached
the sermon I had prepared, the subject of which was as remote from
church quarrels as our atmosphere was remote from peace, and my
congregation dispersed with expressions of such artless disappointment
that it was all I could do to preserve a dignified gravity.

That night, however, the war was brought into my camp. At the evening
meeting the leader of one of the factions rose to his feet with the
obvious purpose of starting trouble. He was a retired sea-captain, of
the ruthless type that knocks a man down with a belaying-pin, and
he made his attack on me in a characteristically "straight from the
shoulder" fashion. He began with the proposition that my morning sermon
had been "entirely contrary to the Scriptures," and for ten minutes
he quoted and misquoted me, hammering in his points. I let him go on
without interruption. Then he added:

"And this gal comes to this church and undertakes to tell us how we
shall pray. That's a highhanded measure, and I, for one, ain't goin' to
stand it. I want to say right here that I shall pray as I like, when
I like, and where I like. I have prayed in this heavenly way for fifty
years before that gal was born, and she can't dictate to me now!"

By this time the whole congregation was aroused, and cries of "Sit
down!" "Sit down!" came from every side of the church. It was a hard
moment, but I was able to rise with some show of dignity. I was hurt
through and through, but my fighting blood was stirring.

"No," I said, "Captain Sears has the floor. Let him say now all he
wishes to say, for it is the last time he will ever speak at one of our
meetings."

Captain Sears, whose exertions had already made him apoplectic, turned a
darker purple. "What's that?" he shouted. "What d'ye mean?"

"I mean," I replied, "that I do not intend to allow you or anybody else
to interfere with my meetings. You are a sea-captain. What would you do
to me if I came on board your ship and started a mutiny in your crew, or
tried to give you orders?"

Captain Sears did not reply. He stood still, with his legs far apart and
braced, as he always stood when talking, but his eyes shifted a little.
I answered my own question.

"You would put me ashore or in irons," I reminded him. "Now, Captain
Sears, I intend to put you ashore. I am the master of this ship. I have
set my course, and I mean to follow it. If you rebel, either you will
get out or I will. But until the board asks for my resignation, I am in
command."

As it happened, I had put my ultimatum in the one form the old man could
understand. He sat down without a word and stared at me. We sang the
Doxology, and I dismissed the meeting. Again we had omitted prayers.
The next day Captain Sears sent me a letter recalling his subscription
toward the support of the church; and for weeks he remained away from
our services, returning under conditions I will mention later. Even at
the time, however, his attack helped rather than hurt me. At the
regular meeting the following Thursday night no personal criticisms were
included in the prayers, and eventually we had peace. But many battles
were lost and won before that happy day arrived.

Captain Sears's vacant place among us was promptly taken by another
captain in East Dennis, whose name was also Sears. A few days after my
encounter with the first captain I met the second on the street. He had
never come to church, and I stopped and invited him to do so. He replied
with simple candor.

"I ain't comin'," he told me. "There ain't no gal that can teach me
nothin'."

"Perhaps you are wrong, Captain Sears," I replied. "I might teach you
something."

"What?" demanded the captain, with chilling distrust.

"Oh," I said, cheerfully, "let us say tolerance, for one thing."

"Humph!" muttered the old man. "The Lord don't want none of your
tolerance, and neither do I."

I laughed. "He doesn't object to tolerance," I said. "Come to church.
You can talk, too; and the Lord will listen to us both."

To my surprise, the captain came the following Sunday, and during
the seven years I remained in the church he was one of my strongest
supporters and friends. I needed friends, for my second battle was not
slow in following my first. There was, indeed, barely time between in
which to care for the wounded.

We had in East Dennis what was known as the "Free Religious Group," and
when some of the members of my congregation were not wrangling among
themselves, they were usually locking horns with this group. For years,
I was told, one of the prime diversions of the "Free Religious" faction
was to have a dance in our town hall on the night when we were using
it for our annual church fair. The rules of the church positively
prohibited dancing, so the worldly group took peculiar pleasure in
attending the fair, and during the evening in getting up a dance and
whirling about among us, to the horror of our members. Then they spent
the remainder of the year boasting of the achievement. It came to my
ears that they had decided to follow this pleasing programme at our
Christmas church celebration, so I called the church trustees together
and put the situation to them.

"We must either enforce our discipline," I said, "or give it up.
Personally I do not object to dancing, but, as the church has ruled
against it, I intend to uphold the church. To allow these people to make
us ridiculous year after year is impossible. Let us either tell them
that they may dance or that they may not dance; but whatever we tell
them, let us make them obey our ruling."

The trustees were shocked at the mere suggestion of letting them dance.

"Very well," I ended. "Then they shall not dance. That is understood."

Captain Crowell, the father of my dead friend Mrs. Addy, and himself
my best man friend, was a strong supporter of the Free Religious Group.
When its members raced to him with the news that I had said they could
not dance at the church's Christmas party, Captain Crowell laughed
goodhumoredly and told them to dance as much as they pleased, cheerfully
adding that he would get them out of any trouble they got into. Knowing
my friendship for him, and that I even owed my church appointment to
him, the Free Religious people were certain that I would never take
issue with him on dancing or on any other point. They made all their
preparations for the dance, therefore, with entire confidence, and
boasted that the affair would be the gayest they had ever arranged. My
people began to look at me with sympathy, and for a time I felt very
sorry for myself. It seemed sufficiently clear that "the gal" was to
have more trouble.

On the night of the party things went badly from the first. There was
an evident intention among the worst of the Free Religious Group to
embarrass us at every turn. We opened the exercises with the Lord's
Prayer, which this element loudly applauded. A live kitten was hung
high on the Christmas tree, where it squalled mournfully beyond reach of
rescue, and the young men of the outside group threw cake at one another
across the hall. Finally tiring of these innocent diversions, they began
to prepare for their dance, and I protested. The spokesman of the group
waved me to one side.

"Captain Crowell said we could," he remarked, airily.

"Captain Crowell," I replied, "has no authority whatever in this matter.
The church trustees have decided that you cannot dance here, and I
intend to enforce their ruling."

It was interesting to observe how rapidly the men of my congregation
disappeared from that hall. Like shadows they crept along the walls
and vanished through the doors. But the preparations for the dance went
merrily on. I walked to the middle of the room and raised my voice.
I was always listened to, for my hearers always had the hope, usually
realized, that I was about to get into more trouble.

"You are determined to dance," I began. "I cannot keep you from doing
so. But I can and will make you regret that you have done so. The law
of the State of Massachusetts is very definite in regard to religious
meetings and religious gatherings. This hall was engaged and paid for
by the Wesleyan Methodist Church, of which I am pastor, and we have full
control of it to-night. Every man and woman who interrupts our exercises
by attempting to dance, or by creating a disturbance of any kind, will
be arrested to-morrow morning."

Surprise at first, then consternation, swept through the ranks of the
Free Religious Group. They denied the existence of such a law as I had
mentioned, and I promptly read it aloud to them. The leaders went off
into a corner and consulted. By this time not one man in my parish
was left in the hall. As a result of the consultation in the corner, a
committee of the would-be dancers came to me and suggested a compromise.

"Will you agree to arrest the men only?" they wanted to know.

"No," I declared. "On the contrary, I shall have the women arrested
first! For the women ought to be standing with me now in the support
of law and order, instead of siding with the hoodlum element you
represent."

That settled it. No girl or woman dared to go on the dancing-floor,
and no man cared to revolve merrily by himself. A whisper went round,
however, that the dance would begin when I had left. When the clock
struck twelve, at which hour, according to the town rule, the hall had
to be closed, I was the last person to leave it. Then I locked the
door myself, and carried the key away with me. There had been no Free
Religious dance that night.

On the following Sunday morning the attendance at my church broke all
previous records. Every seat was occupied and every aisle was filled.
Men and women came from surrounding towns, and strange horses were
tied to all the fences in East Dennis. Every person in that church
was looking for excitement, and this time my congregation got what it
expected. Before I began my sermon I read my resignation, to take effect
at the discretion of the trustees. Then, as it was presumably my last
chance to tell the people and the place what I thought of them, I spent
an hour and a half in fervidly doing so. In my study of English I
had acquired a fairly large vocabulary. I think I used it all that
morning--certainly I tried to. If ever an erring congregation and
community saw themselves as they really were, mine did on that occasion.
I was heartsick, discouraged, and full of resentment and indignation,
which until then had been pent up. Under the arraignment my people
writhed and squirmed. I ended:

"What I am saying hurts you, but in your hearts you know you deserve
every word of it. It is high time you saw yourselves as you are--a
disgrace to the religion you profess and to the community you live in."

I was not sure the congregation would let me finish, but it did. My
hearers seemed torn by conflicting sentiments, in which anger and
curiosity led opposing sides. Many of them left the church in a white
fury, but others--more than I had expected--remained to speak to me
and assure me of their sympathy. Once on the streets, different groups
formed and mingled, and all day the little town rocked with arguments
for and against "the gal."

Night brought another surprisingly large attendance. I expected more
trouble, and I faced it with difficulty, for I was very tired. Just as I
took my place in the pulpit, Captain Sears entered the church and walked
down the aisle--the Captain Sears who had left us at my invitation some
weeks before and had not since attended a church service. I was sure he
was there to make another attack on me while I was down, and, expecting
the worst, I wearily gave him his opportunity. The big old fellow
stood up, braced himself on legs far apart, as if he were standing on a
slippery deck during a high sea, and gave the congregation its biggest
surprise of the year.

He said he had come to make a confession. He had been angry with "the
gal" in the past, as they all knew. But he had heard about the sermon
she had preached that morning, and this time she was right. It was high
time quarreling and backbiting were stopped. They had been going on too
long, and no good could come of them. Moreover, in all the years he
had been a member of that congregation he had never until now seen
the pulpit occupied by a minister with enough backbone to uphold the
discipline of the church. "I've come here to say I'm with the gal," he
ended. "Put me down for my original subscription and ten dollars extra!"

So we had the old man back again. He was a tower of strength, and he
stood by me faithfully until he died. The trustees would not accept
my resignation (indeed, they refused to consider it at all), and the
congregation, when it had thought things over, apparently decided that
there might be worse things in the pulpit than "the gal." It was even
known to brag of what it called my "spunk," and perhaps it was this
quality, rather than any other, which I most needed in that particular
parish at that time. As for me, when the fight was over I dropped it
from my mind, and it had not entered my thoughts for years, until I
began to summon these memories.

At the end of my first six months in East Dennis I was asked to take on,
also, the temporary charge of the Congregational Church at Dennis, two
miles and a half away. I agreed to do this until a permanent pastor
could be found, on condition that I should preach at Dennis on Sunday
afternoons, using the same sermon I preached in my own pulpit in the
morning. The arrangement worked so well that it lasted for six and a
half years--until I resigned from my East Dennis church. During that
period, moreover, I not only carried the two churches on my shoulders,
holding three meetings each Sunday, but I entered upon and completed a
course in the Boston Medical School, winning my M.D. in 1885, and I also
lectured several times a month during the winter seasons. These were,
therefore, among the most strenuous as well as the most interesting
years of my existence, and I mention the strain of them only to prove my
life-long contention, that congenial work, no matter how much there is
of it, has never yet killed any one!

After my battle with the Free Religious Group things moved much more
smoothly in the parish. Captain Crowell, instead of resenting my
defiance of his ruling, helped to reconcile the divided factions in
the church; and though, as I have said, twice afterward I submitted my
resignation, in each case the fight I was making was for a cause which I
firmly believed in and eventually won. My second resignation was brought
about by the unwillingness of the church to have me exchange pulpits
with the one minister on Cape Cod broad-minded enough to invite me to
preach in his pulpit. I had done so, and had then sent him a return
invitation. He was a gentleman and a scholar, but he was also a
Unitarian; and though my people were willing to let me preach in his
church, they were loath to let him preach in mine. After a surprising
amount of discussion my resignation put a different aspect on the
matter; it also led to the satisfactory ruling that I could exchange
pulpits not only with this minister, but with any other in good standing
in his own church.

My third resignation went before the trustees in consequence of my
protest from the pulpit against a small drinking and gambling saloon
in East Dennis; which was rapidly demoralizing our boys. Theoretically,
only "soft drinks" were sold, but the gambling was open, and the resort
was constantly filled with boys of all ages. There were influences back
of this place which tried to protect it, and its owner was very popular
in the town. After my first sermon I was waited upon by a committee,
that warmly advised me to "let East Dennis alone" and confine my
criticisms "to saloons in Boston and other big towns." As I had nothing
to do with Boston, and much to do with East Dennis, I preached on that
place three Sundays in succession, and feeling became so intense that I
handed in my resignation and prepared to depart. Then my friends rallied
and the resort was suppressed.

That was my last big struggle. During the remaining five years of my
pastorate on Cape Cod the relations between my people and myself were
wholly harmonious and beautiful. If I have seemed to dwell too much on
these small victories, it must be remembered that I find in them such
comfort as I can. I have not yet won the great and vital fight of my
life, to which I have given myself, heart and soul, for the past thirty
years--the campaign for woman suffrage. I have seen victories here and
there, and shall see more. But when the ultimate triumph comes--when
American women in every state cast their ballots as naturally as their
husbands do--I may not be in this world to rejoice over it.

It is interesting to remember that during the strenuous period of the
first few months in East Dennis, and notwithstanding the division in
the congregation, we women of the church got together and repainted and
refurnished the building, raising all the money and doing much of the
work ourselves, as the expense of having it done was prohibitive. We
painted the church, and even cut down and modernized the pulpit. The
total cost of material and furniture was not half so great as the
original estimate had indicated, and we had learned a valuable lesson.
After this we spent very little money for labor, but did our own
cleaning, carpet-laying, and the like; and our little church, if I may
be allowed to say so, was a model of neatness and good taste.

I have said that at the end of two years from the time of my appointment
the long-continued warfare in the church was ended. I was not
immediately allowed, however, to bask in an atmosphere of harmony, for
in October, 1880, the celebrated contest over my ordination took place
at the Methodist Protestant Conference in Tarrytown, New York; and for
three days I was a storm-center around which a large number of truly
good and wholly sincere men fought the fight of their religious lives.
Many of them strongly believed that women were out of place in the
ministry. I did not blame them for this conviction. But I was in the
ministry, and I was greatly handicapped by the fact that, although I was
a licensed preacher and a graduate of the Boston Theological School, I
could not, until I had been regularly ordained, meet all the functions
of my office. I could perform the marriage service, but I could not
baptize. I could bury the dead, but I could not take members into my
church. That had to be done by the presiding elder or by some other
minister. I could not administer the sacraments. So at the New England
Spring Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in Boston in
1880, I formally applied for ordination. At the same time application
was made by another woman--Miss Anna Oliver--and as a preliminary
step we were both examined by the Conference board, and were formally
reported by that board as fitted for ordination. Our names were
therefore presented at the Conference, over which Bishop Andrews
presided, and he immediately refused to accept them. Miss Oliver and
I were sitting together in the gallery of the church when the bishop
announced his decision, and, while it staggered us, it did not really
surprise us. We had been warned of this gentleman's deep-seated
prejudice against women in the ministry.

After the services were over Miss Oliver and I called on him and asked
him what we should do. He told us calmly that there was nothing for
us to do but to get out of the Church. We reminded him of our years of
study and probation, and that I had been for two years in charge of two
churches. He set his thin lips and replied that there was no place
for women in the ministry, and, as he then evidently considered the
interview ended, we left him with heavy hearts. While we were walking
slowly away, Miss Oliver confided to me that she did not intend to leave
the Church. Instead, she told me, she would stay in and fight the matter
of her ordination to a finish. I, however, felt differently. I had done
considerable fighting during the past two years, and my heart and soul
were weary. I said: "I shall get out, I am no better and no stronger
than a man, and it is all a man can do to fight the world, the flesh,
and the devil, without fighting his Church as well. I do not intend to
fight my Church. But I am called to preach the gospel; and if I cannot
preach it in my own Church, I will certainly preach it in some other
Church!"

As if in response to this outburst, a young minister named Mark Trafton
soon called to see me. He had been present at our Conference, he had
seen my Church refuse to ordain me, and he had come to suggest that I
apply for ordination in his Church--the Methodist Protestant. To leave
my Church, even though urged to do so by its appointed spokesman, seemed
a radical step. Before taking this I appealed from the decision of the
Conference to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
which held its session that year in Cincinnati, Ohio. Miss Oliver
also appealed, and again we were both refused ordination, the General
Conference voting to sustain Bishop Andrews in his decision. Not content
with this achievement, the Conference even took a backward step. It
deprived us of the right to be licensed as local preachers. After this
blow I recalled with gratitude the Reverend Mark Trafton's excellent
advice, and I immediately applied for ordination in the Methodist
Protestant Church. My name was presented at the Conference held in
Tarrytown in October, 1880, and the fight was on.

During these Conferences it is customary for each candidate to retire
while the discussion of his individual fitness for ordination is in
progress. When my name came up I was asked, as my predecessors had
been, to leave the room for a few moments. I went into an anteroom and
waited--a half-hour, an hour, all afternoon, all evening, and still
the battle raged. I varied the monotony of sitting in the anteroom by
strolls around Tarrytown, and I think I learned to know its every stone
and turn. The next day passed in the same way. At last, late on Saturday
night, it was suddenly announced by my opponents that I was not even
a member of the Church in which I had applied for ordination. The
statement created consternation among my friends. None of us had thought
of that! The bomb, timed to explode at the very end of the session,
threatened to destroy all my hopes. Of course, my opponents had
reasoned, it would be too late for me to do anything, and my name would
be dropped.

But it was not too late. Dr. Lyman Davis, the pastor of the Methodist
Protestant Church in Tarrytown, was very friendly toward me and my
ordination, and he proved his friendship in a singularly prompt and
efficient fashion. Late as it was, he immediately called together
the trustees of his church, and they responded. To them I made my
application for church membership, which they accepted within five
minutes. I was now a member of the Church, but it was too late to obtain
any further action from the Conference. The next day, Sunday, all the
men who had applied for ordination were ordained, and I was left out.

On Monday morning, however, when the Conference met in its final
business session, my case was reopened, and I was eventually called
before the members to answer questions. Some of these were extremely
interesting, and several of the episodes that occurred were very
amusing. One old gentleman I can see as I write. He was greatly excited,
and he led the opposition by racing up and down the aisles, quoting
from the Scriptures to prove his case against women ministers. As he
ran about he had a trick of putting his arms under the back of his coat,
making his coat-tails stand out like wings and incidentally revealing
two long white tapestrings belonging to a flannel undergarment. Even
in the painful stress of those hours I observed with interest how
beautifully those tape-strings were ironed!

I was there to answer any questions that were asked of me, and the
questions came like hailstones in a sudden summer storm.

"Paul said, 'Wives, obey your husbands,'" shouted my old man of the
coat-tails. "Suppose your husband should refuse to allow you to preach?
What then?"

"In the first place," I answered, "Paul did not say so, according to
the Scriptures. But even if he did, it would not concern me, for I am a
spinster."

The old man looked me over. "You might marry some day," he predicted,
cautiously.

"Possibly," I admitted. "Wiser women than I am have married. But it
is equally possible that I might marry a man who would command me to
preach; and in that case I want to be all ready to obey him."

At this another man, a bachelor, also began to draw from the Scriptures.
"An elder," he quoted, "shall be the husband of one wife." And he
demanded, triumphantly, "How is it possible for you to be the husband of
a wife?"

In response to that I quoted a bit myself. "Paul said, 'Anathema unto
him who addeth to or taketh from the Scriptures,'" I reminded this
gentleman; and added that a twisted interpretation of the Scriptures was
as bad as adding to or taking from them, and that no one doubted that
Paul was warning the elders against polygamy. Then I went a bit further,
for by this time the absurd character of the questions was getting on my
nerves.

"Even if my good brother's interpretation is correct," I said, "he has
overlooked two important points. Though he is an elder, he is also a
bachelor; so I am as much of a husband as he is!"

A good deal of that sort of thing went on. The most satisfactory episode
of the session, to me, was the downfall of three pert young men who in
turn tried to make it appear that as the duty of the Conference was to
provide churches for all its pastors, I might become a burden to the
Church if it proved impossible to provide a pastorate for me. At that,
one of my friends in the council rose to his feet.

"I have had official occasion to examine into the matter of Miss Shaw's
parish and salary," he said, "and I know what salaries the last three
speakers are drawing. It may interest the Conference to know that Miss
Shaw's present salary equals the combined salaries of the three young
men who are so afraid she will be a burden to the Church. If, before
being ordained, she can earn three times as much as they now earn after
being ordained, it seems fairly clear that they will never have to
support her. We can only hope that she will never have to support them."

The three young ministers subsided into their seats with painful
abruptness, and from that time my opponents were more careful in their
remarks. Still, many unpleasant things were said, and too much warmth
was shown by both sides. We gained ground through the day, however, and
at the end of the session the Conference, by a large majority, voted to
ordain me.

The ordination service was fixed for the following evening, and even the
gentlemen who had most vigorously opposed me were not averse to making
the occasion a profitable one. The contention had already enormously
advertised the Conference, and the members now helped the good work
along by sending forth widespread announcements of the result. They also
decided that, as the attendance at the service would be very large, they
would take up a collection for the support of superannuated ministers.
The three young men who had feared I would become a burden were
especially active in the matter of this collection; and, as they had no
sense of humor, it did not seem incongruous to them to use my ordination
as a means of raising money for men who had already become burdens to
the Church.

When the great night came (on October 12, 1880), the expected crowd came
also. And to the credit of my opponents I must add that, having lost
their fight, they took their defeat in good part and gracefully assisted
in the services. Sitting in one of the front pews was Mrs. Stiles, the
wife of Dr. Stiles, who was superintendent of the Conference. She was
a dear little old lady of seventy, with a big, maternal heart; and when
she saw me rise to walk up the aisle alone, she immediately rose, too,
came to my side, offered me her arm, and led me to the altar.

The ordination service was very impressive and beautiful. Its peace
and dignity, following the battle that had raged for days, moved me
so deeply that I was nearly overcome. Indeed, I was on the verge of a
breakdown when I was mercifully saved by the clause in the discipline
calling for the pledge all ministers had to make--that I would not
indulge in the use of tobacco. When this vow fell from my lips a
perceptible ripple ran over the congregation.

I was homesick for my Cape Cod parish, and I returned to East Dennis
immediately after my ordination, arriving there on Saturday night.
I knew by the suppressed excitement of my friends that some surprise
awaited me, but I did not learn what it was until I entered my dear
little church the following morning. There I found the communion-table
set forth with a beautiful new communion-service. This had been
purchased during my absence, that I might dedicate it that day and for
the first time administer the sacrament to my people.




VI. CAPE COD MEMORIES

Looking back now upon those days, I see my Cape Cod friends as clearly
as if the intervening years had been wiped out and we were again
together. Among those I most loved were two widely differing
types--Captain Doane, a retired sea-captain, and Relief Paine, an
invalid chained to her couch, but whose beautiful influence permeated
the community like an atmosphere. Captain Doane was one of the finest
men I have ever known--highminded, tolerant, sympathetic, and full of
understanding, He was not only my friend, but my church barometer. He
occupied a front pew, close to the pulpit; and when I was preaching
without making much appeal he sat looking me straight in the face,
listening courteously, but without interest. When I got into my subject,
he would lean forward--the angle at which he sat indicating the
degree of attention I had aroused--and when I was strongly holding my
congregation Brother Doane would bend toward me, following every word
I uttered with corresponding motions of his lips. When I resigned we
parted with deep regret, but it was not until I visited the church
several years afterward that he overcame his reserve enough to tell me
how much he had felt my going.

"Oh, did you?" I asked, greatly touched. "You're not saying that merely
to please me?"

The old man's hand fell on my shoulder. "I miss you," he said, simply.
"I miss you all the time. You see, I love you." Then, with precipitate
selfconsciousness, he closed the door of his New England heart, and from
some remote corner of it sent out his cautious after-thought. "I love
you," he repeated, primly, "as a sister in the Lord."

Relief Paine lived in Brewster. Her name seemed prophetic, and she once
told me that she had always considered it so. Her brother-in-law was my
Sunday-school superintendent, and her family belonged to my church. Very
soon after my arrival in East Dennis I went to see her, and found
her, as she always was, dressed in white and lying on a tiny white bed
covered with pansies, in a room whose windows overlooked the sea. I
shall never forget the picture she made. Over her shoulders was an
exquisite white lace shawl brought from the other side of the world by
some seafaring friend, and against her white pillow her hair seemed the
blackest I had ever seen. When I entered she turned and looked toward
me with wonderful dark eyes that were quite blind, and as she talked her
hands played with the pansies around her. She loved pansies as she loved
few human beings, and she knew their colors by touching them. She was
then a little more than thirty years of age. At sixteen she had fallen
downstairs in the dark, receiving an injury that paralyzed her, and
for fifteen years she had lain on one side, perfectly still, the Stella
Maris of the Cape. All who came to her, and they were many, went away
the better for the visit, and the mere mention of her name along the
coast softened eyes that had looked too bitterly on life.

Relief and I became close friends. I was greatly drawn to her, and
deeply moved by the tragedy of her situation, as well as by the
beautiful spirit with which she bore it. During my first visit I regaled
her with stories of the community and of my own experiences, and when I
was leaving it occurred to me that possibly I had been rather frivolous.
So I said:

"I am coming to see you often, and when I come I want to do whatever
will interest you most. Shall I bring some books and read to you?"

Relief smiled--the gay, mischievous little smile I was soon to know so
well, but which at first seemed out of place on the tragic mask of her
face.

"No, don't read to me," she decided. "There are enough ready to do that.
Talk to me. Tell me about our life and our people here, as they strike
you." And she added, slowly: "You are a queer minister. You have not
offered to pray with me!"

"I feel," I told her, "more like asking you to pray for me."

Relief continued her analysis. "You have not told me that my affliction
was a visitation from God," she added; "that it was discipline and well
for me I had it."

"I don't believe it was from God," I said. "I don't believe God had
anything to do with it. And I rejoice that you have not let it wreck
your life."

She pressed my hand. "Thank you for saying that," she murmured. "If I
thought God did it I could not love Him, and if I did not love Him I
could not live. Please come and see me VERY often--and tell me stories!"

After that I collected stories for Relief. One of those which most
amused her, I remember, was about my horse, and this encourages me to
repeat it here. In my life in East Dennis I did not occupy the lonely
little parsonage connected with my church, but instead boarded with a
friend--a widow named Crowell. (There seemed only two names in Cape Cod:
Sears and Crowell.) To keep in touch with my two churches, which were
almost three miles apart, it became necessary to have a horse. As Mrs.
Crowell needed one, too, we decided to buy the animal in partnership,
and Miss Crowell, the daughter of the widow, who knew no more about
horses than I did, undertook to lend me the support of her presence and
advice during the purchase. We did not care to have the entire community
take a passionate interest in the matter, as it would certainly have
done if it had heard of our intention; so my friend and I departed
somewhat stealthily for a neighboring town, where, we had heard, a very
good horse was offered for sale. We saw the animal and liked it; but
before closing the bargain we cannily asked the owner if the horse was
perfectly sound, and if it was gentle with women. He assured us that it
was both sound and gentle with women, and to prove the latter point
he had his wife harness it to the buggy and drive it around the
stable-yard. The animal behaved beautifully. After it had gone through
its paces, Miss Crowell and I leaned confidingly against its side,
patting it and praising its beauty, and the horse seemed to enjoy our
attentions. We bought it then and there, drove it home, and put it in
our barn; and the next morning we hired a man in the neighborhood to
come over and take care of it.

He arrived. Five minutes later a frightful racket broke out in the
barn--sounds of stamping, kicking, and plunging, mingled with loud
shouts. We ran to the scene of the trouble, and found our "hired man"
rushing breathlessly toward the house. When he was able to speak he
informed us that we had "a devil in there," pointing back to the barn,
and that the new horse's legs were in the air, all four of them at once,
the minute he went near her. We insisted that he must have frightened or
hurt her, but, solemnly and with anxious looks behind, he protested that
he had not. Finally Miss Crowell and I went into the barn, and received
a dignified welcome from the new horse, which seemed pleased by our
visit. Together we harnessed her and, without the least difficulty,
drove her out into the yard. As soon as our man took the reins, however,
she reared, kicked, and smashed our brand-new buggy. We changed the man
and had the buggy repaired, but by the end of the week the animal had
smashed the buggy again. Then, with some natural resentment, we made a
second visit to the man from whom we had bought her, and asked him why
he had sold us such a horse.

He said he had told us the exact truth. The horse WAS sound and she WAS
extremely gentle with women, but--and this point he had seen no reason
to mention, as we had not asked about it--she would not let a man come
near her. He firmly refused to take her back, and we had to make the
best of the bargain. As it was impossible to take care of her ourselves,
I gave some thought to the problem she presented, and finally devised a
plan which worked very well. I hired a neighbor who was a small, slight
man to take care of her, and made him wear his wife's sunbonnet and
waterproof cloak whenever he approached the horse. The picture he
presented in these garments still stands out pleasantly against the
background of my Cape Cod memories. The horse, however, did not share
our appreciation of it. She was suspicious, and for a time she shied
whenever the man and his sunbonnet and cloak appeared; but we stood by
until she grew accustomed to them and him; and as he was both patient
and gentle, she finally allowed him to harness and unharness her. But
no man could drive her, and when I drove to church I was forced to hitch
and unhitch her myself. No one else could do it, though many a gallant
and subsequently resentful man attempted the feat.

On one occasion a man I greatly disliked, and who I had reason to know
disliked me, insisted that he could unhitch her, and started to do so,
notwithstanding my protests and explanations. At his approach she rose
on her hind-legs, and when he grasped her bridle she lifted him off his
feet. His expression as he hung in mid-air was an extraordinary mixture
of surprise and regret. The moment I touched her, however, she quieted
down, and when I got into the buggy and gathered up the reins she
walked off like a lamb, leaving the man staring after her with his eyes
starting from his head.

The previous owner had called the horse Daisy, and we never changed the
name, though it always seemed sadly inappropriate. Time proved, however,
that there were adva

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