A Woman's Pulpit

I FELL to regretting to-day, for the first time in my life, that I am an old maid ; for this reason : I have a very serious, long, religious story to tell, and a brisk matrimonial quarrel would have been such a vivacious, succinct, and secular means of introducing it.

But when I said, one day last winter, “ I want some change,” it was only Mädchen who suggested, “Wait for specie payment.”

And when I said, for I felt sentimental, and it was Sunday too, “ I will offer myself as a missionary in Boston,” I received no more discouraging reply than, “ I think I see you ! You’d walk in and ask if anything could be done for their souls to-day ? And if they said No, you’d turn around and come out ! ”

And when I urged, “ The country heathen requires less courage ; I will offer myself in New Vealshire,” I was met by no louder lion than the insinuation, “ Perhaps I meant to turn Universalist, then ? ”

“ Madchen ! ” said I, “ you know better ! ”

“Yes,” said Madchen.

“ And you know I could preach as well as anybody ! ”

“Yes,” said Madchen.

“ Well ! ” said I.

“Well !” said Madchen.

So that was all that was said about itFor Madchen is a woman and minds her own business.

It should be borne in mind, that I am a woman “ myself, Mr. Copperful!,” and that the following correspondence, now for the first time given to the public, was accordingly finished and filed, before Madchen ever saw or thought of it.

This statement is not at all to the point of my purpose, further than that it may have, as I suppose, some near or remote bearings, movable on springs to demand, upon the business abilities — by which, as nearly as I can make out, is meant the power of holding one’s tongue — of the coming woman, and that I am under stress of oath never to allow an opportunity to escape me, of strewing my garments in the way of her distant, royal feet.

“ To be sparing,” as has been said, “ of prefatory, that is to say, of condemnatory remarking,” I append at once an accurate vellum copy of the valuable correspondence in question.

HERCULES, February 28, 18—.

SECRETARY OF THE NEW VEALSHIRE HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY.

REVEREND AND DEAR SIR : — I am desirous of occupying one of your vacant posts of ministerial service : place and time entirely at your disposal. I am not a college graduate, nor have I yet applied for license to preach. I am, however, I believe, the possessor of a fair education, and of some slight experience in usefulness of a kind akin to that which I seek under your auspices, as well as of an interest in the neglected portions of New England, which ought to warrant me success in an attempt to serve their religious welfare.

For confirmation of these statements I will refer you, if you like, to the Rev. Dr. Dagon of Dagonsville, and to Professor Tacitus of Sparta.

An answer at your earliest convenience, informing me if you are disposed to accept my services, and giving me details of terms and times, will oblige,

Yours respectfully, J. W. BANGS.

HARMONY, N. V., March 5, 18—. J. W. BANGS, ESQ.

MY DEAR SIR : —Your lack of collegiate education is an objection to your filling one of our stations, but not an insurmountable one. I like your letter, and am inclined to think favorably of the question of accepting your services. I should probably send you among the Gray Hills, and in March. We pay six dollars a week and “ found.” Will this be satisfactory ? Let me hear from you again.

Truly yours, Z. Z. ZANGROW, Sect. N. V. H. M. S.

P. S. I have been too busy as yet to pursue your recommendations, but have no doubt that they are satisfactory.

HERCULES, March 9, 18—.

REV. DR. ZANGROW.

DEAR SIR : —Yours of the 5th is at hand. Terms are satisfactory. I neglected to mention in my last that I am a woman.

Yours truly, JERUSHA W. BANGS.

HARMONY, N. V., March 9, 18—.

JERUSHAW. BANGS.

DEAR MADAM:—You have played me an admirable joke. Regret that I have no time to return it.

Yours very sincerely, Z. Z. ZANGROW, Sect.

HERCULES, March 11th.

DEAR SIR : — I was never more in earnest in my life.

Yours, J. W. BANGS.

HARMONY, March 14th.

DEAR MADAM : — I am sorry to hear it.

Yours, Z. Z. ZANGROW.

HERCULES, March 15, 18—.

REV. DR. ZANGROW.

MY DEAR SIR : — After begging your pardon for encroaching again upon your time and patience, permit me to inquire if you are not conscious of some slight — we will call it by its mildest possible cognomen — inconsistency in your recent correspondence with me ? By your own showing, I am individually and concretely qualified for the business in question ; I am generally and abstractly beyond its serious recognition. As an educated American Christian, I am capable, by the word that goeth forth out of my mouth, of saving the Vealshire Mountain soul. As an educated American Christian woman, I am remanded by the piano and the crochet-needle to the Hercules parlor soul.

You will — or you would, if it fell to your lot — send me under the feminine truce flag of “teacher ” into Virginia to speak on Sabbath mornings to a promiscuous audience of a thousand negroes : you forbid me to manage a score of White - Mountaineers. Mr. Spurgeon’s famous lady parishioner may preach to a “ Sabbath-school class ” of seven hundred men : you would deny her the scanty hearing of your mission pulpits.

My dear sir, to crack a hard argument, you have, in the words of Sir William the logical, “mistaken the associations of thought for the connections of existence.” If you will appoint me a brief meeting at your own convenience in your own office in Harmony, I shall not only be very much in debt to your courtesy, but I shall convince you that you ought to send me into New Vealshire.

Meantime I am Sincerely yours, J. W. BANGS.

HARMONY, March 18, 18—.

MY DEAR Miss Bangs:—You are probably aware that, while it is not uncommon in the Universalist pulpit to find the female preacher, she is a specimen of humanity quite foreign to Orthodox ecclesiastical society.

I will confess to you, however (since you are determined to have your own way), that I have expressed in our hurried correspondence rather a denominational and professional than an individual opinion.

I can give you fifteen minutes on Tuesday next at twelve o’clock in my office, No. 41 Columbia Street.

It will at least give me the pleasure to make your personal acquaintance, whether I am able or not to gratify your enthusiastic and somewhat eccentric request.

I am, my dear madam, Cordially yours, Z. Z. ZANGROW, Sect.

I went, I saw, I conquered. I stayed fifteen minutes, just. I talked twelve of them. The secretary sat and drummed meditatively upon the table for the other three. He was a thin man in a white cravat. Two or three other thin men in white cravats came in as I was about to leave. The secretary whispered to them; they whispered to the secretary: they and the secretary looked at me. Somebody shook his head : somebody else shook his head. The secretary, drumming, smiled. Drumming and smiling, he bowed me out, merely remarking that I should hear from him in the course of a few days.

In the course of a few days I heard from him. I have since acquired a vague suspicion, which did not dawn at the time upon my broadest imagination, that the secretary sent me into New Vealshire as a private, personal, metaphysical speculation upon the woman question, and that the New Vealshire Home Missionary Society would sooner have sent me to heaven.

However that may be, I received from the secretary the following : —

HARMONY, N. V., March 23, 18—.

DEAR MISS BANGS : — I propose to send you as soon as possible to the town of Storm, New Vealshire, to occupy on trial, for a few weeks, a small church long unministered to, nearly extinct. You will be met at the station by a person of the name of Dobbins, with whom I shall make all necessary arrangements for your board and introduction.

When can you go ?

Yours, etc., Z. Z. ZANGROW, Sect.

HERCULES, March 24, 18—.

MY DEAR DR. ZANGROW : — I can go to-morrow.

Yours, etc., J. W. BANGS.

A telegram from the secretary, however, generously allowed me three days “to pack.” If I had been less kindly entreated at his hands, I should have had nothing to pack but my wounded dignity. I always travel in a bag. Did he expect me to preach out a Saratoga trunkful of flounces ? I explosively demanded of Madchen ?

“ He is a man,” said Madchen, soothingly, “and he hasn’t behaved in the least like one. Don’t be hard upon him.”

I relented so far as to pack a lace collar and an extra paper of hairpins. Madchen suggested my best bonnet. I am sorry to say that I locked her out of the room.

For the benefit of any of my sex who may feel induced to follow in my footsteps, I will here remark that I packed one dress, Barnes on Matthew, Olshausen on something else, a Tischendorff Testament, Madchen’s little English Bible, Jeremy Taylor (Selections), and my rubber boots. Also, that my bag was of the large, square species, which gapes from ear to ear.

“It isn’t here,” said Madchen, patiently, as I locked the valise.

“Madchen,” said I, severely, “if you mean my Florentine, I am perfectly aware of it. I am going to preach in black ties, — always ! ”

“ Storm ! ” said Madchen, concisely. As that was precisely what I was doing, to the best of my abilities, I regarded Madchen confusedly, till I saw the Pathfinder on her knees, her elbows on the Pathfinder, and her chin in her hands.

“It isn’t here,” repeated Madchen, “nor anything nearer to it than Whirlwind. That’s in the eastern part of Connecticut.”

I think the essentially feminine fancy will before this have dwelt upon the fact that the secretary’s letter was not, to say the least of it, opulent in directions for reaching the village of Storm. I do not think mine is an essentially feminine fancy. I am sure this never had occurred to me.

When it comes to Railway Guides, I am not, nor did I ever profess to be, strong-minded. When I trace, never so patiently, the express to Kamtschatka, I am let out of the Himalaya, Saturday-night accommodation. If I aim at a morning call in the Himalayas, I am morally sure to be landed on the southern peak of Patagonia. Madchen, you understand, would leave her card in the Himalayas, if she had to make the mountains when she got there.

So, when Madchen closed the Pathfinder with a snap of despair, I accepted her fiat without the wildest dream of disputing it, simply remarking that perhaps the conductor would know.

“ Undoubtedly,” said Madchen, with her scientific smile. “Tell him you are going to see Mr. Dobbin of New Vealshire. He cannot fail to set you down at his back door.”

He did, or nearly. If I cannot travel on paper, I can on iron. Although in the Pathfinder’s index I am bewildered, routed, non est inventus, “ a woman and an idiot,” I can master the patois of brakemen and the hearts of conductors with unerring ease. I am sure I don’t know how I got to Storm, and when I got there I was sure I did n’t know how I was to get back again ; but the fact remains that I got there. I repeat it with emphasis. I beg especially to call the masculine attention to it. I desire the future historian of “Woman in the Sacred Desk,” as he playfully skims the surface of antiquated opposition to this then long-established phase of civilization, to make a note of it, that there was a woman, and she at the disadvantage of a pioneer, who got there.

Before proceeding to a minute account of my clerical history, I should like to observe, for the edification of the curious as well as for the instruction of the imitative, that I labored under the disadvantage of ministering to two separate and distinct parishes, which it was as impossible to reconcile as hot coals and parched corn. These were the Parish Real and the Parish Ideal. At their first proximity to each other, my ideal parish hopped in the corn-popper of my startled imagination, and, as nearly as I can testify, continued in active motion till the popper was full.

Let us, then, in the first place, briefly consider (you will bear, I am sure, under the circumstances, with my “ porochial ” style)

The Parish Ideal.

It was “in the wilderness astray,” but it abounded in fresh meat and canned vegetables. Its inhabitants were heathen, of a cultivated turn of mind. Its opportunities were infinite, its demands delicately considerate ; its temper was amiable, its experience infantine. It numbered a score or so of souls, women and children for the most part; with a few delightful old men, whose white hairs would go down in sorrow to the grave, should they miss, in the afternoon of life, the protecting shade of my ministrations. I collected my flock in some rude tenement,— a barn perhaps, or antiquated school-house, — half exposed to the fury of the elements, wholly picturesque and poetical. Among them, but not of them, at a little table probably, with a tallow candle, I sat and talked, as the brooks run, as the clouds fly, as waves break ; smoothly, as befitted a kind of New Vealshire conversazione; eloquently, as would Wesley, as would Whitfield, as would Chalmers, Spurgeon, Beecher.

Royally but modestly, I ruled their stormy hearts. (N. B. No pun intended.) Their rude lives opened, paved with golden glories, to my magic touch. Hearts, which masculine wooing would but have intrenched in their shells of ignorance and sin, bowed, conquered, and chained to their own well-being and the glory of God — or their minister — by my woman’s fingers. I lived among them as their idol, and died — for I would die in their service — as their saint. Madchen might stay at home and make calls. For me, I had found the arena worthy of my possibilities, and solely created for my happiness.

I wish to say just here, that, according to the best information which I can command, there was nothing particularly uncommon, certainly nothing particularly characteristic of my sex, in this mental pas seul through which I tripped. I suspect that I was no more interested in myself, and as much interested in my parishioners, as most young clergymen. The Gospel ministry is a very poor business investment, but an excellent intellectual one. Your average pastor must take care of his own horse, dress his daughter in her rich relations’ cast-off clothing, and never be able to buy the new Encyclopædia, as well at the end of twenty years as of two. But he bounds from his recitation-room into a position of unquestioned and unquestionable official authority and public importance, in two months. No other profession offers him this advantage. To be sure, no other profession enfolds the secret, silent, tremendous struggles and triumphs, serving and crowning of the Christian minister, — a struggle and service which no patent business motive can touch at arm’s length ; a triumph and crown which it is impossible to estimate by the tests of the bar, the bench, the lecture-room. But as it is perfectly well known that this magazine is never read on Sundays, and that the introduction of any but “ week-day holiness” into it would be the ruin of it, I refrain from pursuing my subject in any of its finer, inner lights, such as you can bear, you know, after church, very comfortably ; and have only to bespeak your patience for my delay in introducing you to

The Parish Real.

I arrived there on Saturday night, at the end of the day, a ten miles’ stage-ride, and a final patch of crooked railway, in a snow-storm. Somebody who lectures has somewhere described the unique sensations of hunting in a railway station for a “committee” who never saw you, and whom you never saw. He should tell you how I found Air. Dobbin, for I am sure I cannot. I found myself landed in a snow-drift — I suppose there was a platform under it, but I never got so far—with three other women. The three women had on waterproofs ; I had on a waterproof. There were four men and a half, as nearly as I could judge, in slouched hats, to be seen in or about the little crazy station. One man, one of the whole ones, was a ticketed official of some kind ; the other two were lounging against the station walls, making a spittoon of my snow-drift; the half-man was standing with his hands in his pockets.

“ Was you lookin’ for anybody in partikkelar ? ” said one of the waterproofs, thoughtfully, or curiously, as I stood dismally regarding the prospect.

“Thank you. Yes. Can you tell me if Mr. Do— ”

“obbins,” said the half-man at this juncture, “ Bangs ? ”

“ Yes, sir.”

“ New parson ? ”

“ Yes, sir.”

“ That’s the talk ! ” said Mr. Dobbins. “ Step right round here, ma’am ! ”

“ Right round here,” brought us up against an old buggy sleigh, and an old horse with patient ears. “ Hold on a spell,” said Mr. Dobbins, “ I ’ll put ye in.”

Now Mr. Dobbins was not, as I have intimated, a large man. Whether he were actually a dwarf, or whether he only got so far and stopped, I never satisfactorily discovered. But at all events, I could have “ put ” Air. Dobbins into anything twice as comfortably as I could support the reversal of the process ; to say nothing of the fact that the ascent of a sleigh is not at most a superhuman undertaking. However, not wishing to wound his feelings, I submitted to the situation, and Air. Dobbins handed me in and tucked me up, with consummate gallantry. I mention this circumstance, not because I was prepared for, or expected, or demanded, in my ministerial capacity, any peculiar deference to my sex, but because it is indicative of the treatment which, throughout my ministerial experience, I received.

“ Comfortable ? ” asked Mr. Dobbins after a pause, as we turned our faces eastward, towards a lonely landscape of billowy gray and white, and in the jaws of the storm ; “ ’cause there’s four miles and three quarters of this. Tough for a lady.”

I assured him that I was quite comfortable, and that if the weather were tough for a lady, I was too.

“ You don’t ! ” said Mr. Dobbins. Another pause followed, after which Mr. Dobbins delivered himself of the following: —

“ Been at the trade long ? ”

“ Of preaching ? Not long.”

“ Did n’t expect it, you know ” (confidentially). “ Not such a young un. Never thought on’t.”

Not feeling called upon to make any reply to this, I made none, and we braved in silence the great gulps of mountain wind that wellnigh swept the buggy sleigh over.

“ Nor so good lookin’, neither,” said Mr. Dobbins, when we had ridden perhaps half a mile.

This was discouraging. A vision of Madchen scientifically smiling, of the Rev. Dr. Z. Z. Zangrow dubiously drumming, of the New Vealshire Home Missionary Society shaking its head, drifted distinctly by me, in the wild white whirlpool over Mr. Dobbins s hat.

Were my professional prospects to be gnawed at the roots by a dispensation of Providence for which I was, it would be admitted by the most prejudiced, not in the least accountable ? Were the Universalist clergywomen never young and “good lookin’ ? ”

I did not ask Mr. Dobbins the question, but his next burst of eloquence struck athwart it thus: —

“ Had ’em here in spots, ye see ; Spiritooalist and sech. There ’s them as thinks’t ain’t scriptooral in women folks to hev a hand in the business, noway. Then ag’in there’s them as feels very like the chap whose wife took to beatin of him ; ‘It amuses her, and it don’t hurt me.’ Howsomever, there’s them as jest as lieves go to meetin’ as not, when there’s nothin’ else goin’ on. Last one brought her baby, and her husband he sat with his head ag’in the door, and held it.”

To these consoling observations Mr. Dobbins added, I believe, but two others in the course of our four miles and three quarters’ drive ; these were equally cheering : —

“ S’pose you know you ’re ticketed to Samphiry’s.”

I was obliged to admit that I had never so much as heard a rumor of the existence of Samphiry.

“ Cousin of mine,” explained Mr. Dobbins, “ on the mother’s side. Children got the mumps down to her place. Six on ’em.”

It will be readily inferred that Mr. Dobbins dropped me in the drifts about Samphiry’s front door, in a subdued state of mind. Samphiry greeted me with a sad smile. She was a little yellow woman in a red calico apron. Six children, in various picturesque stages of the disease which Mr. Dobbins had specified, hung about her.

“ Law me, child ! ” said Samphiry, when she had got me in by the fire, taken my dripping hat and cloak, and turned me full in the dying daylight and living firelight. “ Why, I don’t believe you ’re two year older than Mary Ann ! ”

Mary Ann, an overgrown child of perhaps seventeen, in short dresses buttoned up behind, sat with her mouth open, and looked at me during the expression of this encouraging comparison.

I assumed my severest ministerial gravity and silence, but my heart was sinking.

I had salt-pork and barley bread for supper, and went to bed in a room where the ice stood on my hair all night, where I wrapped it around my throat as a preventive of diphtheria. I was prepared for hardship, however, and bore these little physical inconveniences bravely ; but when one of Mary Ann’s brothers, somewhere in the extremely small editions, cried aloud from midnight to five A. M., and Samphiry apologized for the disturbance the next morning on this wise: “ — Hope you was n’t kept awake last night, I’m sure. They generally cry for a night or two before they get through with it. If you ’d been a man-minister now, I don't s’pose I should have dared to undertake the keep of you, with mumps in the house; but it’s so different with a woman ; she’s got so much more fellow-feeling for babies; I thought you wouldn’t mind ! ” — I confess that my heart dropped “ deeper than did ever plummet sound.” For about ten minutes I would rather have been in Hercules making calls than in New Vealshire preaching the Gospel.

I was aroused from this brief state of despair, however, by the remembrance of my now near-approaching professional duties ; and after a hot breakfast (of salt-pork and barley bread), I retired to my icy room to prepare my mind appropriately for my morning’s discourse.

The storm had bent and broken since early dawn. The sun and the snow winked blindly at each other. The great hills lifted haughty heads out of wraps of ermine and gold. Outlines in black and gray of awful fissures and caverns gaped through the mass of wealthy color which they held. Little shy, soft clouds fled over these, frightened, one thought; now and then a row of ragged black teeth snapped them up ; I could see them struggle and sink. Which was the more relentless, the beauty or the power of the sight, it were difficult choosing. But I, preparing to preach my first sermon, and feeling in myself (I hope) the stillness and smallness of the very valley of humiliation, did not try to choose. I could only stand at my window and softly say, “ Before the mountains were brought forth, THOU art.”

I do not know whether Mary Ann heard me, but when she appeared at that crisis with my “ shaving-water,” and blushed scarlet, transfixed in the middle of the room, with her mouth open, to beg pardon for the mistake, but “she’d got kinder used to it with the last minister, and never thought till she opened the door and see my crinoline on the chair ! ” I continued, with a gentle enthusiasm : —

“ That is a grand sight, my dear, over there. It ought to make one very good, I think, to live in the face of such hills as those.”

“ I want to know ! ” said Mary Ann, coming and gaping over my shoulder. “ Why, I get as used to ’em as I do to washing-day ! ”

I had decided upon extempore preaching as best adapted to the needs of my probable audience, and, with my icy hands in the warm “shaving-water” and my eyes on the icy hills, was doing some rambling thinking about the Lord’s messages and messengers,—a subject which the color and dazzle and delight of the morning had touched highly to my fancy; but wondering, through my slicing of introduction, firstly, secondly, a, b, c, d, and conclusion, if the rural tenement in which we should worship possessed a dinnerbell, or a gong, or anything of that sort, which could be used as summons to assemble, and if it were not quite time to hear the sound, when Mary Ann introduced herself upon the scene again, to signify that Mr. Dobbins awaited my pleasure down stairs. Somewhat confused by this sudden announcement, I seized my Bible and my hat, and presented myself promptly but palpitating.

“ Morning,” said Mr. Dobbins, with a pleasant smile. “ Rested yet ? ”

I thanked him, and was quite rested.

“You don’t!” said Mr. Dobbins. “ Wal, you see I come over to say that meetin’ ’s gin up for to-day.”

“ Given up ! ”

“ Wal, yes. Ye see there’s such a heft of snow, and no paths broke, and seein’ it was a gal as was goin’ to preach, me and the other deacon we thought she'd get her feet wet, or suthin’, and so we ’greed we would n't ring the bell ! Thought ye’d be glad to be let off. after travellin’ all day yesterday, too ! ”

I looked at Mr. Dobbins. Mr. Dobbins looked at me. There was a pause.

“ Will your paths be broken out by night ? ” I asked, with a terrible effort at self-control.

“ Wal, yes. In spots ; yes ; middlin’ well.”

“ Will my audience be afraid of wetting their feet, after the paths are broken ? ”

“ Bless you, no ! ” said Mr. Dobbins, staring, “ they ’re used to !t.”

“ Then you will please to appoint an evening service, and ring your bell at half past six precisely. I shall be there, and shall preach, if there is no one but the sexton to hear me. And next Sabbath you will oblige me by proceeding with the regular services, whatever the weather, without the least anxiety for my feet.”

“ If you was n’t a minister, I should say you was spunky,” said Mr. Dobbins, thoughtfully. He regarded me for some moments with disturbed interest, blindly suspicious that somebody was offended, but whether pastor or parishioner he could not make out. He was still undecided, when he took to his hat, and I to my “ own sweet thoughts.”

This incident vitally affected my programme for the day. It was harrowing, but it was stimulative. There was the inspiration of the rack about it. The animus of the stake was upon me. I could die, but I would not surrender. I would gain the respect of my parishioners, whether — well, yes — whether I gained their souls or not ; I am not ashamed to say it now, partly because of the true, single, gnawing hunger for usefulness for usefulness’ sake, and for higher than usefulness’ sake, which came to me afterwards, and which, you remember, is all left out for the Sunday magazines ; partly because the acquisition of my people’s respect was a necessary antecedent to that of their salvation.

So by help of a fire which I cajoled from Samphiry, and the shaving-water which was warmer than the fire, I contrived to employ the remainder of the Sabbath in putting my first sermon upon paper.

The bell rang, as I had directed, at half past six. It did not occur to me at the time that it sounded less like a dinner-gong than a church-bell of average size and.respectability. I and my sermon were both quite ready for it, and I tramped off bravely (in my rubber boots), with Mary Ann as my guide, through the drifted and drifting paths. Once more, for the benefit of my sex, I may be permitted to mention that I wore a very plain street suit of black, no crimps, a white collar of linen, and a black tie ; and that I retained my outside garment — a loose sack — in the pulpit.

“ Here we are,” said Mary Ann, as I floundered up half blinded from the depths of a three-feet drift. Here we were indeed. If Mary Ann had not been with me I should have sat down in the drift, and —no, I do not think I should have cried, but I should have gasped a little. Why I should have been horribly unprepared for the sight of a commodious white church, with a steeple, and a belfry and stone steps, and people going up the steps in the latest frill and the stove-pipe hat, the reader who has ever tried to patronize an American seamstress, or give orders to an American servant, or ask an American mechanic if he sees a newspaper, must explain. The citizens of Storm might be heathen, but they were Yankees ; what more could be said ? Sentence a Yankee into the Desert of Sahara for life, and out of the “ sandwiches there ” he would contrive means to live like “other folks.”

However, I did not sit down in the drift, but went on, with meeting-house and worshippers all in an unnatural light like stereoscopic figures, and sat down in the pulpit; a course of conduct which had at least one advantage, — it saved me a cold.

Mr. Dobbins, it should be noted, met me at the church door, and conducted me, with much respect, up the pulpit stairs. When he left me, I removed my hat and intrenched my beating heart behind a hymn-book.

It will be understood that, while I was not unpractised in Sabbath-school teaching, mission prayer-meeting exhortation, “ remarks ” at sewing-schools, and other like avenues of religious influence, of the kind considered suitable for my sex, I had never engaged in anything which could be denominated public speech ; and that, when the clear clang of the bell hushed suddenly, and the pause on the faces of my audience — there may have been forty of them — warned me that my hour had come, I was in no wise more ready to meet it than any Miss A, B, or C, who would be content to employ life in making sofa-pillows, but would be quite safe from putting it to the outré purpose of making sermons.

So I got through my introductory exercises with a grim desperation, and made haste to my sermon. Once with the manuscript in my hands, I drew breath. Once having looked my audience fairly in the eye, I was prepared to conquer or be conquered by it. There should be no half-way work between us. So I held up my head and did my best.

The criticism of that sermon would be, I suspect, a choice morning’s work for any professor of homiletics in the country. Its divisions were numerous and startling ; its introduction occurred just where I thought it would sound best, and its conclusion was adjusted to the clock. I reasoned of righteousness and judgment to come, in learned phrase. Theology and metaphysics, exegesis and zoölogy, poetry and botany, were impressed liberally into its pages. I quoted Sir William Hamilton, Strauss, Aristotle, in liberal allowance. I toyed with the names of Schleiermacher and Copernicus. I played battledoor and shuttlecock with “views” of Hegel and Hobbes. As nearly as I can recollect, that sermon was a hash of literature in five syllables, with a seasoning of astronomy and Adam.

I had the satisfaction of knowing, when I read as modestly, reverently, and as much like an unanointed churchmember as I knew how, a biblical benediction, and sat down again on the pulpit cushions, that if I had not preached the Gospel, I had at least subdued the church-going population of Storm.

Certain rough-looking fellows, upon whom I had had my eye since they came in, — there were several of them, grimy and glum, with keen eyes ; men who read Tom Paine, you would say, and had come in “to see the fun,” — while I must admit that they neither wept nor prayed, left the house in a respectful, stupid way that was encouraging.

“ You gin it to us 1 ” said Mr. Dobbins, enthusiastically. “ Folks is all upsot about ye. That there was an eloquent discourse, marm. Why, they don’t see but ye know jest as much as if ye was n’t a woman ! ”

And when I touched Mary Ann upon the shoulder to bring her home, I found her sitting motionless, not quite strangled stiff. She had made such a cavern of her mouth, during my impassioned peroration, that an irreligious boy somewhere within good aim had snapped an India-rubber ball into it, which had unfortunately stuck.

Before night, I had reason to feel assured from many sources that I had “made a hit” in my corner of New Vealshire. But before night I had locked myself into the cool and dark, and said, as was said of the Charge of the Six Hundred: “It is magnificent : but it is not war ! ”

But this is where the Sunday part of my story comes in again, so it is of no consequence to us. Suffice it to say that I immediately appointed a little prayermeeting, very much after the manner of the ideal service, for the following Wednesday night, in the school-house, with a little table, and a tallow candle, too. The night was clear, and the room packed. The men who read Tom Paine were there. There were some old people present who lived out of walking distance of the church. There were a few young mothers with very quiet children. I succeeded in partially ventilating the room, and chanced on a couple of familiar hymns. It needed only a quiet voice to fill and command the quiet place. I felt very much like a woman, quite enough like a lady, a little, I hope, like a Christian too. Like the old Greek sages, I “was not in haste to speak ; I said only that which I had resolved to say.” The people listened to me, and prayed as if they felt the better for it. My meeting was full of success and my heart of hope.

Arrived at this point in my narrative, I feel myself in strong sympathy with the famous historian of Old Mother Morey. For, when “ my Story ’s just begun,” why, “ now, my story ’s done.”

“ Ce n'est pas la victoire, mais le combat,” which is as suitable for autobiographical material, as to “ make the happiness of noble hearts.”

From the time of that little Wednesday-evening meeting my life in Storm was a triumph and a joy, in all the better meanings that triumph and joy can hold. My people respected me first and loved me afterwards. I taught them a little, and they taught me a great deal. I brightened a few weeks of their dulled, drowsy, dejected life : they will gild years of mine.

I desire especially to record that all sense of personal embarrassment and incongruity to the work rapidly left me. My people at once never remembered and never forgot that I was a woman. The rudest of the readers of the “ Age of Reason ” tipped his hat to me, and read “ Ecce Homo” to gratify me, and after that the Gospel of John to gratify himself.

Every Sabbath morning I read a plain-spoken but carefully written sermon, which cost me perhaps three days of brain-labor. Every Sabbath afternoon I talked of this and that, according to the weather and the audience. Every Wednesday night I sat in the school-house, behind the little table and the tallow candle, with the old people and the young mothers, and the hush, and the familiar hymns, and lines of hungry faces down before me that made my heart ache at one look and bound at the next. It used to seem to me that the mountains had rather starved than fed them. They were pinched, compressed, shut-down, shut-in faces. All their possibilities and developments of evil were those of the dwarf, not of the giant. They were like the poor little Chinese monsters, moulded from birth in pitchers and vases ; all the crevices and contortions of life they filled, stupidly. Whether it was because, as Mary Ann said, they “got as used to the mountains as they did to washing-day,” and the process of blunting to one grandeur dulled them to all others, I can only conjecture; but of this my New Vealshire experience convinced me : the temptations to evil of the city of Paris will bear no comparison to those of the grandest solitude that God ever made. It is in repression, not in extension, that the danger of disease lies to an immortal life. No risks equal those of ignorance. Daniel Webster may or may not escape the moral shipwrecks of life, but what chance has an idiot beside him ?

“It’s enough to make a man wish he’d been born a horse in a treadmill and done with it ! ” said Happen to me one day. Happen was a poor fellow on whom I made my first “ parish call ” ; and I made a great many between Sunday and Sunday. He lived five miles out of the village, at the end of an inexpressible mountain road, in a gully which lifted a pinched, purple face to the great Harmonia Range. I made, with difficulty, a riding-skirt out of my waterproof, and three miles an hour out of Mr. Dobbins’s horse, and got to him.

The road crawled up a hill into his little low brown shanty, and there stopped. Here he had “farmed it, man and boy,” till the smoke of Virginia battles puffed over the hills into his straightforward brown young eyes.

“ So I up and into it, marm, two years on’t tough ; then back again to my hoe and my wife and my baby, to say nothing of the old lady,— you see her through the door there, bedridden this dozen year, — and never a grain of salt too much for our porridge, I can tell ye, when one day I ’m out to cut and chop, ten mile deep in the furrest, — alon’ too, — and first I know I ’m hit and down with the trunk of a great hickory lyin’ smash ! along this here leg. Suffer ? Well ; it was a day and a half before they found me ; and another halfday afore you can get the nighest doctor, you see, over to East Storm. Well, mebbe he did his best by me, but mebbe he did n’t know no more how to set a bone nor you do. He vowed there was n’t no fracture there. Fracture ! it was jelly afore his eyes. So he ties it up and leaves a tumbler of suthin’, and off. Mortified? Yes. Been here ever since — on this sofy — yes. Likely to be here — bless you, yes ! My wife, she tends the farm and the baby and the old lady and me. Sometimes we have two meals a day, and again we don’t. When you come to think as your nighest neighbor’s five mile off, and that in winter-time, — why, I can see, a-lookin’ from my sofy six feet of snow drifted across that there road to town,—and nought but one woman in gunshot of you, able to stir for you if you starve ; why, you feel, sometimes, now, marm, beggin' your pardon, you feel like hell ! There’s summer-folks in their kerridges comes riding by to see them there hills, — and kind enough to me some of ’em is, I ’ll say that for ’em, — and I hear them a-talking and chattering among themselves, about ‘the grand sight,’ says they. ‘The d—d sight,’ says I ; for I lie on my sofy and look over their heads, marm, at things they never see, — lines and bars like, over Harmonia, redhot, and criss-cross like prison grates. Which comes mebbe of layin’ and lookin’ so long, and fanciful. They say, I’d stand a chance to the hospital to New York or Boston, mebbe. I hain’t gin it up yet. I’ve hopes to go and try my luck some day. But I suppose it costs a sight. And my wife, she’s set her heart on the leg’s coming to of itself, and so we hang along. Sometimes folks send me down books and magazines and such like. I got short o’ reading this winter and read the Bible through ; every word, from ‘ In the beginning’ to ‘Amen.’ It’s quite a pretty little story-book, too. True? I don’t know about that. Most stories set up to be true. I s’pose if I was a parson, and a woman into the bargain, I should think so.”

Among my other parochial discoveries, I learned one day, to my exceeding surprise, that Samphiry — who had been reticent on her family affairs — was the widow of one of my predecessors. She had married him when she was young and pretty, and he was young and ambitious,—“Fond of his book, my dear,” she said, as if she had been talking of some dead child, “but slow in speech, like Aaron of old. And three hundred and fifty dollars was tight living for a family like ours. And his heart ran out, and his people, and maybe his sermons, too. So the salary kept a-dropping off, twenty-five dollars at a time, and he could n’t take a newspaper, besides selling the library mostly for doctor’s bills. And so he grew old and sick and took to farming here, without the salary, and baptized babies and prayed with sick folks free and willing, and never bore anybody a grudge. So he died year before last, and half the valley turned out to bury him. But that didn’t help it any, and I know you’d never guess me to be a minister’s widow, as well as you do, my dear. I ’m all washed out and flattened in. And I can’t educate my children, one of them. If you’ll believe it, I don't know enough to tell when they talk bad grammar half the time, and I ‘d about as lieves they’d eat with their knives as not. If they get anything to eat, it’s all I’ve got heart to care. I’ve got an aunt down in Massachusetts, but it’s such a piece of work to get there. So I suppose we shall live and die here, and I don’t know but it’s just as well.”

What a life it was ! I felt so young, so crude, so blessed and bewildered beside it, that I gave out that night, at evening prayers, and asked Samphiry to “ lead ” for herself and me. But I felt no older, no more finished, no less blessed or bewildered, when she had done so.

I should not neglect to mention that I conducted several funerals while I was in Storm. I did not know how, but I knew how to be sorry, which seemed to answer the same purpose ; at least they sought me out for the object from far and near. On one occasion I was visited by a distant neighbor, with the request that I would bury his wife. I happened to know that the dead woman had been once a member of the Methodist church in East Storm, whose pastor was alive, active, and a man.

“Would it not be more suitable,” I therefore suggested, “ at least more agreeable to the feelings of Brother Hand, if you were to ask him to conduct either the whole or a part of the service ? ”

“ Waal, ye see, marm,” urged the widower, “ the cops was partikelar sot on hevin' you, and as long as I promised her afore she drawed her last that you should conduct the business, I think we ’d better perceed without any reference to Brother Hand. I've been thinking of it over, and I come to the conclusion that he could n’t take offence on so slight an occasion !”

I had ministered “ on trial ” to the people of Storm, undisturbed by Rev. Dr. Zangrow, who, I suspect, was in private communication of some sort with Mr. Dobbins, for a month, — a month of pouting, spring weather, and long, lazy walks for thinking, and brisk, bright ones fordoing ; of growing quite fond of salt-pork and barley bread ; of calling on old, bedridden women, and hunting up neglected girls, and keeping one eye on my Tom Paine friends ; of preaching and practising, of hoping and doubting, of struggling and succeeding, of finding my heart and hands and head as full as life could hold; of feeling that there was a place for me in the earnest world, and that I was in my place ; of feeling thankful every day and hour that my womanhood and my work had hit and fitted ; of a great many other tilings which I have agreed not to mention here, — when one night the stage brought me a letter which ran: —

HERCULES, April 28, 18—.

MY DEAR : — I have the measles.

MÄDCHEN.

Did ever a woman try to do anything, that some of the children did not have the measles ?

1 felt that fate was stronger than I.

I bowed my head submissively, and packed my valise shockingly. Some of the people came in a little knot that night to say good by. The women cried and the men shook hands hard. It was very pleasant and very heartbreaking. I felt a dismal foreboding that, once in the clutches of Hercules and Mädchen, I should never see their dull, dear faces again. I left my sorrow and my Jeremy Taylor for Happen, and my rubber-boots for Samphiry. I tucked the lace collar and the spare paper of hairpins into Mary Ann’s upper drawer. I begged Mr. Dobbins’s acceptance of Barnes on Matthew, with the request that he would start a Sunday school.

In the gray of the early morning the patient horse trotted me over, with lightened valise and heavy heart, to the crazy station. When I turned my head for a farewell look at my parish, the awful hills were crossed with Happen’s redhot bars, and Mary Ann, with her mouth open, stood in her mother’s crumbling door.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.