Laicus; Or, the Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish Part 24

"'I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of G.o.d, who loved me, and gave himself for me.'"

CHAPTER XXV.

Our Church-Garden.

ONE needs no other evidence that Maurice Mapleson is working a wonderful transformation in this parish than is afforded by the change which has been made in the external appearance of the church.

It is true that Miss Moore always was a worker. But I do not believe that even Miss Moore could have carried out her plan of a church garden under Mr. Work. And Mr. Work was a good minister too.

When I first came to Wheathedge the Calvary Presbyterian church was externally, to the pa.s.ser-by, distinguished chiefly for the severe simplicity of its architecture, and the plainness, not to say the homeliness, of its surroundings. It is a long, narrow, wooden structure, as dest.i.tute of ornament as Squire Line's old fas.h.i.+oned barn. Its only approximation to architectural display is a square tower surmounted by four tooth-picks pointing heavenward, and encasing the bell. A singular, a mysterious bell that was and is. It expresses all the emotions of the neighborhood. It pa.s.ses through all the moods and inflections of a hundred hearts. To-day it rings out with soft and sacred tones its call to wors.h.i.+p. To-morrow from its watch-tower it sees the crackling flame in some neighboring barn or tenement, and utters, with loud and hurried and anxious voice, its alarm. Anon, heavy with grief, it seems to enter, as a sympathising friend, into the very heart experiences of bereaved and weeping mourners. And when the rolling year brings round Independence day, all the fluctuations of feeling which mature and soften others are forgotten, and it trembles with the excitement of the occasion, and laughs, and shouts, and capers merrily in its homely belfry, as though it were a boy again.

Pardon the digression. But I love the dear old bell. And its voice is musical to me, albeit I sometimes fancy, like many another singer's it is growing weak and thin with age.

The surroundings of the church were no better than the external aspect. The fence was broken down. The cows made common pasture in the field-there is an acre of ground with the church, I believe-till the gra.s.s was eaten so close to the ground that even they disdained it. A few trees eked out a miserable existence. Most of them, girdled by cattle, were dead. A few still maintained their "struggle for life," but looked as though they pined for the freedom of the woods again. Within, the church justified the promise of its external condition. The board of trustees are poor. Every man had been permitted to upholster his own pew. Some, without owners, were also without upholstering. In the rest, the only merit was variety.

The church looked as though it had clothed itself in a Joseph's coat of many colors; or rather, its robe presented the appearance of poor Joe Sweaten's pantaloons, which are so darned and pieced and mended that no man can guess what the original material was, or whether any of it is left. There was but one redeeming feature-the bouquet upon the pulpit. Every Sunday, Sophie Jowett brought that bouquet. As her father had a large conservatory, the bouquet was rarely missing even in winter. As she has admirable taste it was always beautiful even when the flowers were not rare. She had done her work very quietly, had asked no permission, had consulted with no one. One Sabbath the bouquet appeared upon the pulpit. After that it was never missing, except one Sunday when Miss Sophie was sick, and for three weeks in the Fall, when she was away from home.

Such was the condition of the church at Wheathedge when I bought my house.

Last spring Miss Sophie was married. There were more tears and less radiance than usual at that wedding. Mr. Line said that he never could supply the place in the Sunday-school. Mr. Work came up from New York to marry them. His voice was tenderer than usual when he p.r.o.nounced the marriage ceremony. The first Sabbath after that wedding the pulpit was without flowers. Was there any who did not miss them, and in missing them did not miss her? It took the last ornament from our church, which thenceforth looked desolated enough.

When Maurice Mapleson came the bouquet came back. But it was made mostly of wild flowers. I think his wife began it. Perhaps it was this which suggested to Miss Moore's fertile brain the idea of a church-garden.

At all events one Wednesday after prayer-meeting Miss Moore and Mrs.

Biskit came to me. "We want a dollar from you," said Miss Moore.

"What for?" said I. Not that I thought of questioning Miss Moore's demand,--no one ever does that; but because I naturally liked to know what my money was going to do.

"We are going to start a church-garden," said she. "The trustees have given us the ground, and we want to raise about ten dollars for a beginning."

I gave her the dollar and thought no more about it; indeed, I should have accounted the scheme quite chimerical if there had been any one at the head of it except Miss Moore.

However, the next week, as I was pa.s.sing the church, I saw Miss Moore and Mrs. Biskit at work in the churchyard. A little plot had been spaded up at one side, one or two walks laid out, and they were busy putting in some flower seed. I thought of offering my services.

But as my agricultural education was neglected in my youth, and as my knowledge of gardening is very limited, I pa.s.sed on.

My chance came pretty soon. When Miss Moore has anything to do for the church every one gets an opportunity to help.

It could not have been more than two or three days later, when, as I pa.s.sed, I perceived that she had already increased her stock of gardeners. Half a dozen young men were working with a will. She had half of the minister's Bible-cla.s.s engaged. Two of them had brought a load of gravel from down under the hill as you go to the Mill village. They were shoveling this out at the front gate, while some others were spreading it in a broad walk up to the church-door. A great pile of sods lay right by the side of the growing gravel-heap.

Deacon Goodsole, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, was raking over the ground preparing it for gra.s.s-seed. "Rather late for gra.s.s-seed," he had remonstrated, but the inexorable Miss Moore had replied, "Better late than never." Four or five of the boys, who had used the church common as a ball-ground, were enlisted-a capital stroke of policy that. Among them was Bill Styles, who prides himself on throwing a stone higher and with surer aim than any other boy in Wheathedge, and had demonstrated it by stoning all the gla.s.s out of the tower windows. A melancholy-looking cow, transfixed with astonishment, had stopped in the middle of the road to look with bewilderment upon their invasion of its ancient territory. I leaned for a moment on the tottering fence and looked, equally bewildered, on the busy scene.

But Miss Moore never suffers any one to look on idly where she is laboring. "Ah! Mr. Laicus," said she, cheerily, "you are just the man we want. That cow will come in through these gaps in the fence and undo our work in an hour after we leave it. I wish you would get hold of somebody and fix it up." With that she was off again, and I was in for an office.

Deacon Goodsole afterwards told me confidentially that he was caught in the same way.

Now, though I am no gardener, I am a bit of a carpenter. So, after taking the dimensions of the fence, mentally, I started off for the material, which Mr. Hardcap gave, and, with the aid of a volunteer or two, I succeeded in so far filling the breach that the melancholy cow gave up her little game, and walked philosophically away.

To make a long story short, the result of Miss Moore's energetic endeavors was seen the next Sabbath, in part, in an entirely new aspect of affairs, which has been constantly improving since. The board of trustees, moved thereto partly by the energies of Miss Moore, partly by those of their Baptist neighbors who have just got into a new church, have commenced to build a new fence. A graveled walk, free from dust in drought and from mud in rainy weather, leads up to the church-door. A border of sod on either side melts gradually away into the beginning of a lawn of gra.s.s which will be fuller and better next year than this. On a couple of fan shaped lattices, in which I take a little pride as my own handiwork, a honey-suckle on one side of the church-door and a prairie rose on the other are planted. In imagination I already see them reaching out their tendrils in courts.h.i.+p over the door. I should not wonder if next Spring should celebrate their nuptials. Some ivy, planted by Miss Moore, on the eastern side of the church promises in time to embosom it in green. A parterre of flowers in the rear, has already helped to furnish the pulpit every Sunday with a bouquet, and, Miss Moore declares, will, another summer, give the minister a bouquet on his study table all the week, and messengers of beauty to add to the comfort of many a sick-room. And in the Fall Deacon Goodsole and I with half a dozen young men from the pastor's Bible-cla.s.s are going up into the woods for some maples to set out in the place of the dead sticks which served only as monuments of the departed.

But Miss Moore is in a quandary. She does not know what to do with her ten dollars. All the work was given. Even Pat Maloney, Roman Catholic though he is, would not take anything for spading up the ground for "our church garden."

I am a conservative man. But I do wish Miss Moore could be chairman of our board of trustees for a year or two.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Our Temperance Prayer-Meeting.

IT is late in the fall. The summer birds have fled southward. The summer residents have fled to their city homes. The mountains have blossomed out in all the brilliance of their autumnal colors; but the transitory glory has gone and they are brown and bare. One little flurry of snow has given us warning of what is coming. The furnace has been put in order; the double windows have been put on; a storm-house has enclosed our porch; a great pile of wood lies up against the stable, giving my boy promise of plenty of exercise during the long winter. And still the summer lingers in these bright and glorious autumnal days. And of them the carpenters and the painters are making much in their work on the new library-hall.

Do not let the reader deceive himself by erecting in his imagination an edifice of brick or stone, with all the magnificent architectural display which belongs to the modern style of American cosmopolitan architecture. Library-hall is a plain wooden building, one story high, and containing but three rooms. It is to cost us just $1,000, when it is finished. Let me record here how it came to be begun.

Temperance is not one of the virtues for which Wheathedge is, or ought to be, famous. I know not where you will find cooler springs of more delicious water, than gush from its mountain sides. I know not where you will find grapes for home wine-that modern recipe for drunkenness-more abundant or more admirably adapted to the vintner's purpose. But the springs have few customers, and one man easily makes all the domestic wine which the inhabitants of Wheathedge consume. But at the landing there are at least four grog-shops which give every indication of doing a thriving business, beside Poole's, half-way to the Mill village; to say nothing of the bar the busiest room by all odds, at Guzzem's hotel, busiest, alas! on the Sabbath day.

Maurice Mapleson is not one who considers that his parish and his congregation are coterminus. "I like the Established Church for one thing," he says. "The parish is geographical, not ecclesiastical.

All within its bounds are under the parson's care. In our system the minister is only responsible for his own congregation. It is like caring for the wounded who are brought into hospital, and leaving those that are on the field of battle uncared for."

A little incident occurring soon after he came, first opened Maurice's eyes, I think, to the need of temperance reform in the community.

He had occasion, one evening after prayer-meeting, to visit a sick child of his Sabbath-school. The family were poor and his road led him down near the brickyard toward "Limerick," as this settlement of huts-half house, half pig-stye-is derisively called. The night was dark, and returning, abstracted in thought, he almost fell over what he first took to be a log lying in the street. It was a man, who, on a cursory examination, proved to be suffering under no less a disorder than that of hopeless intoxication. It was a dangerous bed.

Maurice made one or two unsuccessful attempts to arouse the fellow, but in vain. Retracing his steps a few rods to the nearest hut, he summoned a.s.sistance, and with the aid of Pat sober, got Pat drunk upon his feet. But he was quite too drunk to help himself, and too large and heavy to be left to the sole charge of Pat sober, who happened to recognize a friend, whose home he said was a quarter of a mile down the valley. Maurice, who had preached a few Sundays ago on the parable of the Good Samaritan, could not bring himself to imitate the example of the Priest and Levite; so steadying the tipsy pedestrian on one side, while sober Pat sustained him on the other, they half led, half dragged the still unconscious sleeper to a little round hut, which he called home. The wife was sitting up for her husband and received both him and his custodians with objurgations loud on the first, and thanks equally loud addressed to the others. No sooner was the stupid husband safely deposited on the bed than, begging them to wait a moment, she went to the cupboard and taking down a big, black bottle, half filled a cracked tea-cup with whiskey, which she offered to Maurice as an expression of her grat.i.tude. "I do not know," said Maurice to me, as he told me the story, "that she will ever forgive me for declining, though I couched my declension as courteously as possible."

Coming home and pondering this incident, he made up his mind that something must be done for the temperance cause in Wheathedge; and further pondering led him to the conclusion that he must begin at the church.

So one evening last week he came round to talk with me about it.

"The first thing," said he to me, "is to arouse the Church. I believe in preaching the gospel of temperance to the Jews first, and afterwards to the Gentiles. I will begin in the Synagogue.

Afterwards I will go to the streets, and lanes, and highways."

"You will meet with some opposition," said I. "A temperance meeting in the church has never been heard of in Wheathedge. You will be departing from the landmarks."

"Do you think so?" said Maurice.

"I am sure of it," said I.