Wayside Courtships | Page 8

this young girl. Her bare head,
with simple arrangement of hair, someway seemed the most beautiful

thing he had ever seen.
He thought of her as he sat at the table with George and his aged
mother. They lived alone, and their lives were curiously silent. Once in
a while a low-voiced question, and that was all.
George read the Popular Science, Harper's Monthly Magazine, and the
Open Court, and brooded over them with slow intellectual movement.
It was wonderful the amount of information he secreted from these
periodicals. He was better informed than many college graduates.
He had little curiosity about the young stranger. He understood he was
to teach the school, and he did not go further in inquiry.
He tried Wallace once or twice on the latest discoveries of John Fiske
and Edison, and then gave him up and retired to his seat beside the
sitting-room stove.
On the following Monday morning school began, and as Wallace took
his way down the lane the wrecked church came again to his eyes. He
walked past it with slow feet. His was a deeply religious nature, one
that sorrowed easily over sin. Suffering of the poor did not trouble him;
hunger seemed a little thing beside losing one's everlasting soul.
Therefore to come from his studies upon such a monument of human
depravity as this rotting church was to receive a shock and to hear a call
to action.
Approaching the schoolhouse, his thought took a turn toward the
scholars and toward Mattie. He had forgotten to ask her if she intended
to be one of his pupils.
There were several children already gathered at the schoolhouse door
as he came up. It was all very American--the boxlike house of white,
the slender teacher approaching, the roughly clad urchins waiting.
He said, "Good morning, scholars."
They chorused a queer croak in reply--hesitating, inarticulate, shy. He

unlocked the door and entered the cold, bare room--familiar, unlovely,
with a certain power of primitive associations. In such a room he had
studied his primer and his Ray's Arithmetic. In such a room he had
made gradual recession from the smallest front seat to the back wall
seat; and from one side of such a room to the other he had furtively
worshiped a graceful girlish head.
He allowed himself but a moment of such dreaming, and then he
assumed command, and with his ready helpers a fire was soon started.
Other children came in, timorous as rabbits, slipping by with one eye
fixed on him like scared chickens. They pre-empted their seats by
putting down books and slates, and there arose sly wars for possession,
which he felt in curious amusement--it was so like his own life at that
age.
He assumed command as nearly in the manner of the old-time teachers
as he could recall, and the work of his teaching was begun. The day
passed quickly, and as he walked homeward again there stood that
rotting church, and in his mind there rose a surging emotion larger than
he could himself comprehend--a desire to rebuild it by uniting the
warring factions, of whose lack of Christianity it was fatal witness.
IV.
Now this mystical thing happened. As this son of a line of preachers
brooded on this unlovely strife among men, he lost the equipoise of the
scholar and student of modern history. He grew narrower and more
intense. The burden of his responsibility as a preacher of Christ grew
daily more insupportable.
Toward the end of the week he announced preaching in the
schoolhouse on Sunday afternoon, and at the hour set he found the
room crowded with people of all ages and sorts.
His heart grew heavy as he looked out over the room on women
nursing querulous children, on the grizzled faces of grim-looking men,
who studied him with keen, unsympathetic eyes. He had hard,
unfriendly material to work with. There were but few of the opposite

camp present, while the Baptist leaders were all there, with more
curiosity than sympathy in their faces.
They exulted to think the next preacher to come among them as an
evangelist should be a Baptist.
After the singing, which would have dribbled away into failure but for
Mattie, Wallace rose, looking very white and weak, and began his
prayer. Some of the boys laughed when his voice stuck in his throat,
but he went on to the end of an earnest supplication, feeling he had not
touched them at all.
While they sang again, he sat looking down at them with dry throat and
staring eyes. They seemed so hard, so unchristianlike. What could he
say to them? He saw Mattie looking at him, and on the front seat sat
three beautiful little girls huddled together with hands clasped; they
were inexpressibly dainty