¦ wmm OFMANYMEN INMANYMNDS fRANCISE/CLARK 'Jh*^" ^^^t MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS AN AUTOBWGRAPHT \ '^ BY # FRANCIS E. CLARK, D.D., LL.D. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED SOCIETY OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR AND OF THE WORLD'S CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR UNION X UNITED SOCIETY OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR BOSTON CHICAGO Copyright, 1922 BY The United Society of Christian Endeavor PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA M iafc (2 5*4 7 THE PLIMPTON PRESS NORWOOD -MASS ¦ U • S • A 2D*Dtcal*u' TO A HUNDRED THOUSAND FRIENDS IN ALL LANDS A Few of Whom Ake Named in This Volume, and All of Whom Have Blessed My Life; But Especially TO MY WIFE Who Has Shared with Me Three of Five Journeys around the World, as Well as Many Shorter Voyages; Who Has Been My Constant Comfort and Support, and Without Whose Help at the Typewriter, and Frequent Suggestions of Literary Value, This Volume Could Never Have Been Written. To Her I Inscribe It on This Forty-Sixth Anniversary of Our Marriage October 3, 1922 FOREWORD HIS volume has been written in different lands during the last seven years, much of it in snatches of time caught between speaking engagements. The only compara tively free time I have been able to devote to it has been a month or six weeks in Hono lulu in 1 916, and nearly two months in Freiburg, Germany, in the spring of 1922. Even these months were frequently interrupted by unexpected calls for addresses and by demands for articles for different publications. I have had to rely for dates largely on my memory, sup plemented by Mrs. Clark's, and by a few of her " Line-a- Day " books. This may have resulted in slight inaccuracies in dates of minor importance. Yet on the whole I think my readers may congratulate themselves on the fact that I have not kept a careful diary, lest this volume might have swelled to an inordinate size. Old Edmund Waller once wrote: " Poets lose half the praise they should have got; Were it but known what they discreetly blot." So do autobiographers. In their case the last line might be slightly amended to " Were it but known what they, perchance, forgot." My chief sins or chief virtues, as you may look at it, have been those of omission, for in spite of much forgetting, my embarrassment has been the embarrassment of riches. I have recalled so many incidents I wanted to record, and especially so many people I wanted to tell about, that my task has been VI FOREWORD that of using an ever-sharp mental blue-pencil. I have con stantly had to remind myself that my task was to write a per sonal autobiography, and not a history of our times, or a history of the Christian Endeavor movement. A multitude of my friends who have been most usefully prominent in Chris tian Endeavor will not find themselves mentioned in this volume, — not because I have forgotten them, or do not love them, but simply for lack of space in a book which, as it is, I fear is too large. I have had equal difficulty in choosing the illustrations and have looked over no less than two thousand photographs to find a hundred which on the whole seemed most suitable. It has been a genuine joy to write this book, in spite of its inevitable deficiencies and the difficulty of finding time for it, for it has brought to mind dear friends in every land and many happy scenes of fellowship and spiritual communion. I trust that in the future this book may be some contribution to the story of the movement with which my name has been con nected, and which, I feel more and more, as the years go by, is not of man, or of the will of man, but of God. CONTENTS PAGE Chapter I Years 1599-1670 MY EARLY ANCESTORS IN AMERICA The Strenuous Career of Rev. Zechariah Symmes — Anne Hutchinson and the Quakers — The Land of Nod — How My First American Ancestor Helped Me through College — The Clark Branches of the Family Tree ... 1 Chapter II -Years 1840-1854 MY FATHER My Birthplace — Pioneering in Canadian Forests — The Mighty Ottawa — Aylmer and Bytown — A Terrible Epidemic — A Widow's Grief . 10 Chapter III Years 1814-1858 MY MOTHER Her Girlhood — Her Education under Mary Lyon — Her Character — Her Wonderful Journal — Her Struggle for Self-Support — My Brother Charles — Charlie's Death ... .16 Chapter IV Years 1856-1869 MY BOYHOOD Earliest Memories — My Mother's Death — Good-by to Aylmer — Beautiful Auburndale — Memories of the Civil War — Claremont — Academy Days 28 Chapter V Years 1 869-1873 DARTMOUTH DAYS Dartmouth Centennial Commencement — Chief Justice Chase and General Tecumseh Sherman — Our President and Professors — Primitive Days at Dartmouth — Fraternity Life — Literary Efforts — Football in the Old Days — Teaching School Winters . . 42 vii vin CONTENTS PAGE Chapter VI Years i 873-1 876 ANDOVER DAYS Two Great Theologians and Teachers — Sermon Clubs — Mission Work — Where I Met My Fate — My Wife's Forbears 57 Chapter VII Years 1876-1883 WILLISTON DAYS A Young Pastor's First Church — ¦ The Rapid Growth of Williston — The "Beautiful City by the Sea" — Maine's Great Men — Personal Recollec tions of Thomas B. Reed 67 Chapter VIII Year 1881 THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR MOVEMENT February 2, 1881 — Pre-Christian-Endeavor Societies — Cookies and a Con stitution — A Wonderful Transformation — Growth of Christian Endeavor throughout the Country — Denominational Opposition 77 Chapter IX Years 1883-1887 IN SOUTH BOSTON An Unusual Installation — • South Boston in the Eighties — A Generous Church — Phillips Church Society of Christian Endeavor — The Golden Rule — Farewell to the Pastorate 88 Chapter X Years 1888-1891 TRAVELING DAYS BEGIN My First Foreign Christian Endeavor Journey — The Kindly Sunday-School Union — An Objection Answered — William E. Gladstone — Auburndale Again 99 Chapter XI Years 1 892-1 893 EARLY JOURNEYS IN LANDS AFAR The American Quartette — "New York '92" — A Round-the-World Commis sion — • Six Weeks in Australia — China, Japan, and India — In the Centre of a Typhoon — A Sore Disappointment 107 CONTENTS xx PAGE Chapter XII Year 1893 IN PALESTINE, TURKEY, AND EUROPE The Terrors of Jaffa — Turkish Objections to Literature — Unsuccessful At tempts at Smuggling — The Birthplace of St. Paul — Cilician Gates and Taurus Mountains — A Perilous Journey — Constantinople and Hamid II. — Spain and England 118 Chapter XIII Year 1893 CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP AND CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR Partisan Politics — A Tragedy Turned into Comedy — An Unexpected Cold Douche — The Prudential Committee 132 Chapter XIV Years 1885-1922 TRUE YOKEFELLOWS Some of My Fellow-Workers — God's Chosen Men — Where and How They Were Found — What They Have Done — ¦ Many Unnamed Workers — The Hand of Providence 137 Chapter XV Years 1876-1922 A SHORT CHAPTER ON RECREATIONS The Maine Woods — A Memorable Canoe Trip — The Little Backwoods Girl 151 Chapter XVI Years 1892-1922 CONCERNING INTERPRETERS AND INTERPRETATION How Christian Endeavor Started in Continental Europe — Interpreters or Interrupters — A Ludicrous Translation — The Ability of Japanese In terpreters 155 Chapter XVII Years 1884-1922 GREAT BRITAIN AND GREAT BRITISHERS A Score of the World's Most Eloquent Preachers — ¦ Drs. Meyer, Clifford, Maclaren, Parker, Spurgeon, and Many Others — In Spurgeon's Class- Room — Dr. Parker's Humor — A Good Irish Story — William T. Stead . 162 x CONTENTS page Chapter XVIII Years 1896-1898 MEXICO, JAMAICA, AND CUBA Mexico Twenty-five Years Ago — Zacatecas — Lovely Jamaica — An Unusual Greeting — Cuba and the Spanish War . 181 Chapter XIX Years 1896-1897 DISMAL DAYS IN INDIA Two Wonderful Conventions — En Route to India — Lord Northcliffe — A Terrible Plague — An Awful Famine — William Carey First and Third — A Chain of Love — Off for Africa . . 190 Chapter XX Year 1897 SOUTH AFRICA BEFORE THE BOER WAR On a Coolie Ship — Among the Zulus — President Kruger ("Oom Paul") — In the Diamond Fields — -A Remarkable School — Andrew Murray and the Murray Family ... . 208 Chapter XXI Year 1900 CHINA IN THE GRIP OF THE BOXERS A Call on Count Okuma — China's Interesting Convention — ¦ Reasons for the Boxer Uprising — A Prayer for Rain — Brave Missionaries — The Mas sacres at Pao-ting-fu — Horace Pitkin — Mary Morrill . . . 223 Chapter XXII Year 1900 ACROSS SIBERIA IN FORTY-TWO DAYS Picturesque Korean Monastery — Landing in Russia — The Siberian Railway — Dangers and Difficulties — Fourth-Class Cars — Lake Baikal — Bla- govyeshchensk — Irkutzk — Moscow at Last . , 239 Chapter XXIII Years 1901-1902 THE CHARM OF SCANDINAVIA IN WINTER An Interview with King Oscar — Prince Bernadotte — A Love Match Locked in the Ice — Finland's Woes .... 2-y CONTENTS xi PAGE Chapter XXIV Year 1902 FROM THE BALKANS TO ICELAND A Missionary Captured by Brigands — Many Races and Languages — Isolated Iceland — The Ancient Althing — Thingvalla — Fishing on the Sog . . . 266 Chapter XXV Years 1903-1904 NEW ZEALAND, THE TOURISTS' PARADISE Definite Goals for Endeavorers — Off for New Zealand — Geyser Wonders — A Boiling Lake — A Terrible Explosion — Endeavor Meetings in Leading Cities . .... . . 278 Chapter XXVI Year 1904 AUSTRALIA AND SOUTH AFRICA REVISITED The Vastness of Australia — A Fruit-Growers' Paradise — Grapes of Eshcol — The "Golden Mile" of West Australia — Across the "Roaring Forties" — Boers and British Together in Christian Endeavor — A Remarkable Captain • . . ... 287 Chapter XXVII Years 1904-1905 HOME AGAIN AND OFF AGAIN Home by Way of France, England, Scotland, Germany — My Father's Grave ¦ — A Call on President Roosevelt — Crossing the Seas Once More — A History of Christian Endeavor — Ober-Ammergau — Norway and King Haakon . . . 300 Chapter XXVIII Years 1905-1906 HITHER AND YON In Lovely Dalmatia — Montenegro, Country of the Black Mountains — Corfu — The Balkan States — Hungary — Great Britain — Geneva, 1906 312 Chapter XXIX Years 1906-1907 FROM PEACEFUL LAKE MOHONK TO DISTRACTED JAMAICA The Smiley Brothers — Cornell University — Andrew D. White — A Terrible Earthquake — A Ruined City — The Canal Zone — Colonel Gorgas — The President of Panama . . 326 xii CONTENTS PAGE Chapter XXX Year 1907 THE WEST COAST OF SOUTH AMERICA Panama Canal in the Making — Peculiarities of the West Coast — Lima, the Paris of South America — Harvard University in Arequipa — A Perilous Journey — Lake Titicaca — Beautiful Santiago — The Christ of the Andes 335 Chapter XXXI Year 1907 THE EAST COAST OF SOUTH AMERICA The Wonderful City of "Good Air" — An Audience with President Alcorta — Rich Little Uruguay — Rio de Janeiro — The Prince of Cities — A Unique Prayer Meeting — Sao Paulo — The Coffee Region — Home via Europe . 350 Chapter XXXII Year 1908 A VARIED YEAR An Old Enemy — ¦ An Old Friend — Horace Fletcher — Fifty-one Photographs in Twenty-one Days — England, Spain, France, Scandinavia, Holland — A Church Service in Groningen — ¦ Carrie Nation's Hatchet 363 Chapter XXXIII Years 1909-1910 AROUND THE WORLD IN FOUR MONTHS Part I Agra 1909 — "600 American Millionaires" — Travel Talks and Lectures — The Taj Mahal -1- The Praises of the Nations — A Consecration Service by Languages — Our "Round-Top" Meeting 370 Chapter XXXIV Year 19 io AROUND THE WORLD IN FOUR MONTHS Part II Java — The Wild Men of Borneo — Open House in the Philippines — Trou blous China — Hospitable Japan — Beautiful Honolulu — Home Again . 386 Chapter XXXV Years 1908-1922 IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME From the Maine Coast to Cape Cod — A House for £550. — The Charming Maine Coast — Why We Chose Sagamore — Reforming an Abandoned Farm — Rejuvenating an Old House ,q- CONTENTS xiii Chapter XXXVI Year 1911 IN OLD HOMES OF NEW AMERICANS , A Long Zigzag Journey • — Its Purpose, to Acquaint Americans with Austro- Hungarian Immigrants — Poland — ¦ Russia — Petty Prohibitions — • Cra cow — Czernovitz — Where a Camera Is a Novelty — Roumania — Croatia 405 Chapter XXXVII Years 1911-1912 A WINTER IN ATHENS Corinth on the Gulf — Fishermen and Turkey- Women — Phoebe's Old Home in Cenchrea — ¦ The Glories of Athens — Interesting Sights from Our Win dow — An Interview with King George . . 420 Chapter XXXVIII Year 1912 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ST. PAUL Part I Old Thessalonica — Prison of the Great Assassin — Seventy Buried Churches of Berea — Where Paul First Set Foot in Europe — Philippi, Its Dra matic History 43 1 Chapter XXXIX Year 1912 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ST. PAUL Part II Iconium — The Oldest City in the World — Seljukian Turks and Their Won derful Mosques — Why the Dervishes Whirl — Finding the Site of Lystra — How "Christian Dogs" Found Favor — From Stones to Melons — A Noble Missionary Doctor 440 Chapter XL Year 1912 THE SEVEN CITIES OF REVELATION An Interesting Journey to Old Philadelphia — Sardis — • Thyatira — ¦ Perga- mum — Smyrna — Ephesus — Laodicea — A Persian Tomb at Sardis — ¦ Immense Ruins of Pergamum — Desolate Ruins of Laodicea — Scripture Illustrated 450 xiv CONTENTS PAGE Chapter XLI Year 1912 IN THE HOLY LAND ONCE MORE A Sixtieth Birthday — Palestine Just before the Great War — Jerusalem — Nazareth — Damascus — Baalbec — ¦ Beirut — Tyre — Sidon — Cairo — Assiout — Alexandria — Syracuse — Earthquake-Ruined Messina — Poz- zuoli — Rome . . . . ... 470 Chapter XLII Year 1913 THE LAND OF THE MID-DAY MOON Far beyond the Arctic Circle — The Great Magnet — A Day without a Sunrise — Farthest North — A Christian Endeavor Meeting in Norway's National Cathedral — The Romance of the Little Nut-Seller — Finland's Beautiful Churches — Meetings in Germany, France, and Italy . 493 Chapter XLIII Year 1914 A RECORD OF PROVIDENTIAL DELIVERANCES How a Poem Glorified a City — Plans for a New St. Bartholomew's Day — ¦ How the Barcelona Police Frustrated Plans — A Boomerang — A Run away Automobile in London — Almost Shipwrecked 503 Chapter XLIV Years 1914-1922 ON OLD BEACON HILL Boston's Most Interesting Section — Massachusetts' State House — The Authors' Hill — Pinckney Street — The World's Christian Endeavor Building — The Authors' Club — The City Club — The Monday Club . 515 Chapter XLV Year 1915 TYPHOID FEVER AND ITS COMPENSATIONS Some Peace Organizations — A Journey That Was Never Taken — Seventy- five Days in Bed — At Death's Door — President Wilson's Letters — An Unknown Catholic Friend . . . . 523 Chapter XLVI Years 1915-1916 A WINTER IN HONOLULU "Behind the Veil" — Beautiful Honolulu — Our Welcome — Our Hosts — A Happy Winter — Off for Japan • • 533 CONTENTS XV PAGE Chapter XLVII Year 1916 JAPAN IN 19 1 6 Polite Reporters — A Light (?) Schedule — Eminent Editors — A Nobleman's Memories of America — Count Okuma's Cordiality — Asana's Palace — A Peace Banquet — The Late Emperor's Tomb — Our Japanese "Daughter" . . 541 Chapter XLVIII Year 1916 IN THE LAND OF MORNING CALM Korea after Sixteen Years — Great Improvements — National Unrest — Twelve Hundred People at a Prayer Meeting — Pneumonia — Best Laid Plans Gang Aft Agley — Mukden, the Barbaric . . 551 Chapter XLIX Year 1916 THE CHINA OF YUAN SHI KAI Unwise Economy — Beside the Great Wall — Yuan Shi Kai's Pretensions — ¦ Memorable Scenes in Peking — Hangchow — Ten Thousand Miles of Travel for a Ten-Minute Speech — In a Chinese Revolution — Weary Days of Illness — Cormorant Fishing — • Home Again . . 560 Chapter L Years 1916-1917 CLIMBING UP HILL DIFFICULTY TO HEALTHVILLE A Month in Hospital — America in the War — Anxious Days for the World — In Flowery Florida — How a Puritan Home Renewed Its Youth . 576 Chapter LI Years 1917-1919 THE LATER YEARS OF THE WORLD WAR Organizing Christian Endeavor Alumni — Reception in My Boyhood Home — Effect of the War on the Christian Endeavor Movement — • The Sudden End of the War — A Saloonless Nation . 587 Chapter LII Year 1920 THE WORLD AFTER THE WAR The Police Strike in Boston — On the Battlefields of France — A Visit to Jugo-Slavia — Passport Troubles — Distracted Europe — Where the First xvi CONTENTS PAGE Gun Was Fired — Holiday Homes — Some British Meetings — On the Trail of an Ancestor ... 59° Chapter LIII Year 1921 MEXICO IN 1921 How Engagements Multiply — A Quaker City — Mexican Trains Thirty-six Hours Late — Good Friday in the Capital — Thousands of Calla Lilies — Mexico's Beautiful Park and Wonderful Museum — • A Race to Meet En gagements — • Great Churches in Texas . . . 615 Chapter LIV Years 1920-192 i BEGINNINGS OF WORLD PEACE A Glorious Vision of Amity — The Election of 1920 — An Interesting Ceremony — President Harding Becomes a Christian Endeavor Alumnus — The Gracious Lady of the White House — Endeavorers in the Cabinet — The Great Washington Conference — Some Petitions and Their Answers . . . 622 Chapter LV Year 1921 THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR In Portland — Aylmer Swept by Fire — Why I Am Still President — ¦ A Crowning Convention — The Wonderful Parade — "A Warless World by 1923" 631 Chapter LVI Years 1921-1922 FIVE MONTHS IN CENTRAL EUROPE Classical Freiburg — With Our Army on the Rhine — Germany in 1922 — Victorious and Vigorous Czecho-Slovakia — Despoiled Hungary — The Wonderful Bethania Union — Poland and Her Endeavorers — Denmark, Holland, England, Wales — Home 639 Chapter LVII Years 1881-1922 SOME OTHER NOTED PERSONS I HAVE MET Dwight L. Moody — Ira D. Sankey — Theodore Cuyler — T. DeWitt Talmage — • Henry Ward Beecher — • Phillips Brooks — Maltbie D. Babcock Edward Everett Hale — • Vice-President Fairbanks — President Taft Frances E. Willard — Anna Gordon — -"Joe" Cannon — Champ Clark J. H. Kellogg — John Wanamaker — ¦ William J. Bryan 6cn CONTENTS xvii PAGE Chapter LVIII Years 187&-1922 WITH PEN AND TYPEWRITER First Articles and Books about Young People's Work — Travel-Books con cerning Immigrants — ¦ Five Thousand Newspaper Articles — More Am bitious Flights — My Pen as a Tent Needle . . . . 670 Chapter LIX Years 1876-1922 OUR HOME-LIFE Our Six Homes — Many Absences Make Home More Precious — Our Children and Children-in-Law — Pleasant Home Evenings — Home Games — Hikes with My Boys — Family Prayers . ... 678 Chapter LX Year 1922 WHAT MY RELIGION MEANS TO ME Little Time for Religious Controversy — A Covenant, Not a Creed — Ups and Downs of Religious Experience — General O. O. Howard — Stonewall Jackson — Instant in Prayer — More Thanksgivings Than Petitions — My Religion in a Sentence . . . . .... 687 Chapter LXI Years 1851-1922 CHANGES IN THREE-SCORE YEARS AND TEN Seven Wonderful Decades — ¦ Many Administrations — ¦ Anti-Slavery — Pro hibition — Woman Suffrage — The Victorian Era — Morals and Religion — Marvellous Inventions — The World War and Its Effects — A Closing Word of Optimism . 693 ILLUSTRATIONS Portrait of Dr. Clark . . . Frontispiect The Present Symmes Homestead in Winchester, Mass. . . 8 Cherry Cottage .... . . . . . . II The Old Clark Homestead in Tewksbury, Mass. ... . 17 My Mother . . . . . . 22 My Mother, with her Two Sons . . . 24 Group of Dr. Clark's Pictures ... . . . . . . 28 My Adopted Father, Rev. Edward W. Clark . . .... . . 31 My Adopted Mother .... . 33 Dr. Edwards A. Park. . . . ... -59 Harriet Elizabeth Abbott at Thirteen . . 63 Harriet Elizabeth Abbott in 1876 ... . . 65 Williston Chapel . 68 Williston Congregational Church, Portland, Me. ...... 71 The Mizpah Mission Circle . . .... 79 Williston Parsonage in 188 1 80 Mr. Granville Staples. 82 Original Copy of the Constitution, Accepted by the First Christian Endeavorers 85 Former Officers U. S. C. E. .... -89 William Shaw .... . . 93 George B. Graff . . .96 A Corner in the Library of Dr. Clark's Home in Auburndale, Mass. . 103 A Busy Street of Sydney, New South Wales. 112 Some Leading Christian Endeavorers of Cairo on a Picnic. 119 One of the Great Mosques of Constantinople . .123 The Ceremony of Selamlik . . . 127 Hon. Samuel B. Capen ... . 135 Secretaries Afield U. S. C. E. .138 Officers U. S. C. E ... . . . . 139 Secretary John Willis Baer and Family . . ... 141 George W. Coleman . . . . ... 144 Some of the Earlier Trustees U. S. C. E. . . 147 Camping in Maine . 152 Camp Dean .... . .... 154 A Japanese Christian Endeavor Leader and Family 159 Rev. John Pollock and his Wife and Son; Rev. James Mursell, Miss Elsie Pollock, and Dr. Clark . . . 165 The Organ Cactus of Mexico .... . 182 The Leaders of Christian Endeavor in Jamaica in 1898 . 185 Percy S. Foster ... . . 191 The Christian Endeavor Chorus, Washington, D. C, 1896 . . . 193 The Press Tent of the Christian Endeavor Convention in Detroit . . . . 199 XX ILLUSTRATIONS Acres of Diamonds • . . 214 Parsonage of the First Andrew Murray, Graaf Reinet, Cape Colony . • 218 George Murray's Family with Fifteen Children ... • 221 Old Examination Cells, Now Abolished . 227 A Chinese Soldier in the Regular Army in 1900 ... . 233 A Flash of Lightning ....... . .245 Our Fifth-Class Cars on the Trans-Baikal Train . • 249 Prison Barge . . . ¦ 250 A Prison Car on the Trans-Siberian Railway ... . . 251 Our Fellow Passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railway 253 Children of Prince Bernadotte's Family. . . 261 The Ice-Breaker Opening a Path for Our Steamer . . • 265 Mrs. Tsilka and her Baby Elenka . 267 Street in Thorshaven, Faroe Islands . 271 Dr. Clark and His Son Fishing for Trout in Iceland . . • • 275 A Bit of Iceland Scenery 276 Lyell Bridge, New Zealand .... .283 Mangapapa Falls, New Zealand . . 285 In the Fern Forests of Queensland, Australia . 289 The Principal Street in Durban . . ... 295 A Roman Temple of Pola . . 313 A Christian Endeavor Convention . . 323 A Church in Devasted Kingston . 330 Culebra Cut When the Panama Canal was Built. 336 Our Little Train in a Landslide on the High Peruvian Andes 341 The Christ of the Andes . . 348 Botofogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro . . . . 355 Mt. Corcovado, Rio de Janiero ... . . 358 Our Arrival at the Convention City, Agra, 1909 . -374 The Viceregal Encampment ... . . 375 World's Christian Endeavor Convention in Agra . . 379 The Taj Mahal . .383 Triumphal Arch in Nagasaki 391 The Abandoned Old Farmhouse at Sagamore Beach . . 400 The Lily Pond in the "Sunken Orchard" . . . . ... 402 The Clark Family To-day. ... . 403 Polish Peasants . . . 409 Ruins of Temple of Jupiter in Athens. . . . . 424 Mars Hill, Athens ... . 429 The Riverside .... . 438 The Whirling Dervishes of Iconium. . .. 442 Courtyard of the Mosque of the Whirling Dervishes in Iconium 443 The Guest House of Lystra . . . 444 A Very Old Fountain in Lystra ... . . . . 447 Pergamum, One of the Seven Cities of Revelation . . . 457 A Street in Smyrna. . . ... 461 Among the Ruins of Ephesus .... . . . 464 The Fountain of the Virgin, Nazareth . ... . . . 478 ILLUSTRATIONS XXI PAGE Ancient Norwegian Church 496 World's Christian Endeavor Building, Boston, Mass Facing 520 The Great Chicago Convention in 1915 527 Choir of the Chicago Convention, 1915 531 A Street in Honolulu 535 Representatives of Twenty-Six Races and Cross Races .... ... . 538 Christian Endeavor Seamen's Home, Nagasaki, Japan . . 543 The Great Wall of China, Near the Seacoast 561 West Lake, Hangchow . . 570 A Common Mode of Travel in China. .. . ... ...571 Fishing with Cormorants in China 572 Another Method of Going to a Convention . . 574 Mrs. Clark, her Twin Grandchildren, and her Chickens ....... ... 582 The Old Abandoned Farmhouse . . . . ... . . 585 Trustees and Field-Secretaries of Christian Endeavor, at Buffalo . . . 589 The Christian Endeavor House in London. . . . .... 611 President Harding, Christian Endeavor Alumnus. . . . . . 625 Cherry Cottage .... . . ... .... .... 633 Spire of the Wonderful Cathedral in Freiburg . . . .... 640 The Great Monument of Kaiser William the First at the Junction of the Rhine and Moselle . . . ... 643 Dr. and Mrs. Clark with Two Endeavor Soldiers in Coblenz . . . 646 Christian Endeavor Office Staff at German Christian Endeavor Headquarters, Friedrichshagen bei Berlin. . . . ... 647 Statue of John Huss . . . . 649 A Junior Society in Viecbork (Vandsburg), Poland. . ... 653 Our Summer Home at Pine Point, Me., 1880 to 1908 . .... . 679 Mrs. Harriet A. Clark . . .681 The Living-room in the Old Farmhouse . . . . 682 Colony Day in Sagamore, Mass 684 Memories of Many Men in Many Lands Chapter I Years 1599— 1670 MY EARLY ANCESTORS IN AMERICA THE STRENUOUS CAREER OF REV. ZECHARIAH SYMMES ANNE HUTCHINSON AND THE QUAKERS THE LAND OF NOD HOW MY FIRST AMERICAN ANCESTOR HELPED ME THROUGH COLLEGE THE CLARK BRANCHES OF THE FAMILY TREE. UTOBIOGRAPHIES, except by the most distinguished of men, often appear to me to savor of egotism, since they seem to imply that the writer thinks that other people are anxious to know what he has been, and done. Nevertheless I am going to lay myself open to this same charge, since many friends have asked me to write down these reminiscences, and have assured me that they would be of interest, not only to my own children, but to the larger family of Christian Endeavorers, and, possibly, to an even wider circle. A further reason which I have in my own mind for these reminiscences is the fact that the character of my work and the organization that I have especially represented, have brought me in contact, during the last forty years, with some of the foremost men of our times, and other interesting char- 2 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS acters; and, however uninspiring a man's own life may be, his memories and his estimate of others who have helped to make the history of his generation are not without interest. Now that I have more than reached the age of three-score years and ten alloted to man by the Psalmist, and have been reminded of the uncertainty of life by a severe illness and a more severe operation, as well as by two or three somewhat narrow escapes from a violent death, I have decided to write down, in as orderly a fashion as I can, the events of the last one and seventy years, so far as they have touched my little orbit. It is the fashion of some autobiographers to begin with their remote ancestors, but few Americans care to go further back than to the days when their first forbears crossed the salt seas for a home in the new world. Following this precedent, I will say that my first ancestor in America was Rev. Zechariah Symmes, who was born at Canterbury in England in 1599. He was educated at Em manuel College, of the University of Cambridge, where he was graduated in 1620. He was evidently of stern, nonconformist stock, for Cotton Mather tells us that Rev. William Symmes, the father, charged his sons, Zechariah and William, " never to defile themselves with any idolatry or superstition, but to derive their religion from God's Holy Word, and to worship God as He himself has directed, and not after the devices and tradi tions of men." That Zechariah followed his reverend father's instructions, and perhaps improved upon them, is indicated by the fact that he was frequently harassed by prosecutions in the bishops' courts, of which the redoubtable persecutor, William Laud, was then the head. This was some twenty years before Arch bishop Laud's own head fell on Tower Hill in London,, " for his agency in subverting the liberties of England." Without any premonition of what was to happen to him MY EARLY ANCESTORS IN AMERICA 3 when fortune's wheel should revolve again, Laud made it very hot for Zechariah Symmes, and compelled him to leave London, where he was lecturer at St. Anthony's, and to re move to Dunstable in 1625, where he acted as rector for the eight following years. Of my visit to Emmanuel College and to Dunstable in 1920 when on the track of my ancient progenitor, I will speak later, and will only add at this point that Laud and his persecuting myrmidons followed Zechariah to Dunstable. Feeling that he could have no peace in England, he sailed with his wife and seven children in the ship " Griffin," for Boston, where he arrived September 18, 1634. This family counted nine among the two hundred immigrants on the " Griffin," among whom was the famous and somewhat can tankerous Anne Hutchinson, who made so much trouble for the Puritans in later years. Very soon after his arrival in Boston, on a fast day ap pointed for the occasion, Mr. Symmes was elected and ordained the teacher of the church in Charlestown. This church already had a pastor, the Rev. Thomas James, who had been with it since its organization two years before, but after the coming of my ancestor he seems to have confined himself to pastoral labor, while Mr. Symmes did the work of preacher and teacher. It is interesting to recall that the first church in Boston was originally formed in Charlestown, July 30, 1630, and for some time met for worship under the shadow of a great oak. It was soon found, however, that it was difficult for the large families of those days to cross the Charles River, especially in the winter, so the church was removed to Boston, on the other side of the Charles, where a majority of its members re sided, and the new church of which I have been speaking was organized in Charlestown in 1632. This church is,still in ex istence and not long since I had the privilege of preaching to its present day congregation. Alas, there were ministerial differences in the seventeenth 4 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS century, as in the twentieth. It is often difficult for two clergymen of different temperaments, though equally good men, to work together in the same church. It was so in this case. The majority of the people sided with Mr. Symmes, while Mr. James sought fresh fields and pastures new in Providence, New Haven, and Virginia, and afterwards re turned to England, a good and true man and faithful servant of Christ to the end of his long life. Another distinguished member of the Charlestown church was Rev. John Harvard, who came three years later than Mr. Symmes, and who had graduated at the same college in Cambridge. It is thought by some that he was for a time a colleague of Mr. Symmes. This is probably a mistake, for he died of consumption a year after reaching America, but not before he had immortalized himself, and perpetuated his name throughout all coming generations, by willing one-half of all his property, to the amount of 779 pounds, 17 shillings, and two pence, to the great college which bears his name. I have a dim suspicion that my honored ancestor, strong and noble man though he was, was somewhat difficult to get along with, for he not only seems to have had some trouble with his colleague, Mr. James, but was one of the most mili tant of those involved in the celebrated controversy with Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomians. He did not enjoy her company on the voyage, and did not believe in the special revelations with which she regaled him. Nor did he at all approve of the meetings which she held after reaching shore. But she gave as good as he sent, and denounced him and his confreres roundly for " holding to a covenant of works." The end was the banishment of Mrs. Hutchinson from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as every one knows. This Puritan pastor seems to have been involved also in the trouble with the Quakers. I am glad to say that, so far as I know, he had nothing to do with banishing any of them MY EARLY ANCESTORS IN AMERICA 5 though he seems to have annoyed them by his visit's to them while in prison, for " religious conversation suited to their needs." For this and similar efforts, we read, " he was griev ously reviled by the Quakers." I wonder what these " similar efforts " were. I fear they may refer to something besides " religious conversation." But we must remember that some of the Quakers of those days were very unlike the delightful, peace-loving citizens who bear that name to-day, for we read that in some places their conduct was in the highest degree " turbulent and provoking." " Margaret Brewster," it is said, " went into a meeting-house with her face smeared with black paint. Deborah Wilson went through the streets of Salem naked, as a sign of her adherence to the naked truth. Lydia Wardwell went into a meeting house in Newbury as naked as she was born." Many opened their shops on the Lord's Day in defiance of the laws, so that the Rev. Zechariah and his fellows had excuses for their harsh ness which are not generally recognized. Toward the end of his life another controversy, which must have been painful at the time, resulted in the formation of the First Baptist Church in Boston. The evil tree of discord thus for once bore good fruit, in multiplying strong evangelical churches throughout all the confines of the city. It seems that one of the members of Mr. Symmes' church — one Thomas Gould — would not bring his infant child for bap tism. In fact the boy lived to be ten years old, and still the symbolic water had not been sprinkled on his brow. The father was repeatedly admonished, and at length, in the year 1665, with others, was excommunicated, and they then formed the First Baptist Church in Boston. This unhappy, yet happy event, marks the contrast between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. Mr. Symmes' salary during most of his ministerial life was ninety pounds sterling a year, a very good stipend for those days, for only one other minister, the eminent John Cotton of 6 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Boston, had as much. Moreover the town of Charlestown was generous to this long-time and greatly honored pastor, and gave him a tract of three hundred acres of land now in the thriving town of Winchester " extending from the north end of Mystic Pond to the borders of Woburn." At another time it gave him three hundred acres more in the " Land of Nod," now within the borders of Wilmington. The latter gift re ceived the name of the region to which Cain banished himself, because it was such a forlorn district and so far from any church, and as Mr. Symmes' twelfth part of the Land of Nod was valued when he died at only five pounds, the region proba bly deserved its name. A small portion of these original grants has remained in different branches of the Symmes family to the present day, and, when a boy, a number of these acres in so-called " Turkey Swamp " in Winchester, which belonged to me, were sold for a few hundred dollars which went toward my college education. I have dwelt at some length on the life of old Zechariah, because of his unique personality, and because his life touched so many of the most interesting events in the early history of Massachusetts. The Reverend Zechariah ended his useful and strenuous career February 4, 1670, having been pastor of the church in Charlestown for more than thirty-five years, and to the very end of his days. So much honored was he that he was buried at the expense of the town, and on his tombstone they en graved his eulogy, two lines of which run as follows: " A prophet lies beneath this stone, His words shall live though he be gone." He left behind him, besides a good name and a modest fortune, a devoted and noble wife and ten children, three others having died before their father. From this good man I am descended in the eighth generation, having for my forbears his son William, and his son William, then three Johns in MY EARLY ANCESTORS IN AMERICA "] succession, while my father broke the hundred-year line of Johns by being named Charles. The militant spirit of Zechariah seems to have descended to many of his descendants, for not a few of them fought in the Revolutionary War. The second John in the series of my ancestors was Captain John Symmes of the Revolutionary army. He was one of the Medford Company, commanded by Cap tain Isaac Hall, which marched to Charlestown on the memo rable seventeenth of June, 1775, but reached Bunker Hill just too late to take part in that fight. He made up for it, however, by enlisting for three years, and was doubtless engaged in many battles, though the particulars of his military career have not been preserved. At the close of the three years he came home, " ragged and emaciated," we are told. He was paid in the depreciated currency of the day, all of which he gave for a yoke of oxen. The oxen he sold and took his pay in the same currency, which he kept for a short time, while it constantly depreciated, and then paid it all for a bag of Indian meal, so that the net financial results of his three years in the Revolu tionary War seems to have been one bag of corn meal. Mahomet Ali, an old man who had served many years in the Turkish army, once told me that he received no pay at all, but when he was discharged was given a ragged red Turk ish fez, — the only soldier of whom I know who fared worse financially than my ancestor, John the second. Another descendant of Zechariah Symmes, though not in my direct line, married General William Henry Harrison, the eighth president of the United States. That his wife, Anna Symmes, had a strong religious influence over old " Tip pecanoe " is indicated by the well-authenticated fact that dur ing the presidential canvass of 1840 a company of politicians from Cincinnati visited the candidate at North Bend. " General Harrison met them at some place near by, and, extending his hand courteously, said, ' Gentlemen, I should be most happy to welcome you on any other day, but if I had no 8 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS regard for religion myself, I have too much respect for the religion of my wife to encourage the violation of the Chris tian Sabbath.' " So far as I know there have been no scalawags among the descendants of Zechariah Symmes, though had there been, pos sibly their misdeeds would not have been recorded in the family memorial. There was, however, one harmless but somewhat distinguished crank, who created a very considerable sensation in his day with his theory of " Concentric Spheres The Present Symmes Homestead in Winchester, Mass. Built by Deacon John Symmes in 1806. and Polar Voids." This was Captain John Cleves Symmes, who fought in the war of 1 8 1 2 and received from his superior officer " honorable mention " for his bravery at the Siege of Fort Erie. After the war he had time to turn his attention to the interior of the earth, and he came to the conclusion that " the earth was hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the Poles." An elaborate book was written to prove this theory, and he did his best to induce Congress to fit out an expedition to explore these concave regions, and visit the inside of the earth. A hard-hearted Congress, however, would not make the appropriation, and he died a broken- MY EARLY ANCESTORS IN AMERICA 9 hearted man with his fantastic theories still the ruling passion of his life. In visiting the second President Harrison, a very distant cousin, at his home in Indianapolis we had a hearty laugh over the vagaries of our common relative. Of the Clark branch of my family tree I do not know as much as of the Symmes branch, but I have no less reason to be proud of its honorable record so far as I know it. The first ancestor of that name of whom I have any certain knowledge was Rev. Thomas Clark, who was born in Boston in 1652, the son of Elder Jonas Clark, graduated at Harvard in 1670, and was settled as pastor in Chelmsford, Mass., the same year. He died in 1 704. As the Scripture genealogy would put it, Thomas begat Jonas, and Jonas begat Thomas, and that Thomas another Thomas, and that Thomas an Oliver, who was my grandfather. All the descendants of the first Thomas appear to have been sturdy and godly men. My own grandfather, Deacon Oliver Clark, was certainly a man of this type. He lived in the town of Tewksbury, Mass., on a farm lying on the edge of the city of Lowell, and now incorporated within its limits. For nearly half a century he was deacon in a church in Tewksbury, and afterwards in the High Street Church of Lowell. He brought up a family of five daughters and three sons, who lived to honor their father's memory, some of them to extreme old age. At one time it was said that the old deacon had thirty-three descendants, all of whom were members " in good and regular standing " of the Orthodox Congregational Church, a dis tinction which meant something in those days of strict examina tion for church membership. But I have written enough about my remoter ancestors. It will be a more congenial task to tell of those who were nearer and dear to me. The fourth child of Deacon Oliver and Nancy Huse Clark, his first wife, was Lydia Fletcher Clark, my own dear mother, to whom I shall devote another chapter. Chapter II Years 1840— 1854 MY FATHER MY BIRTHPLACE PIONEERING IN CANADIAN FORESTS THE MIGHTY OTTAWA AYLMER AND BYTOWN A TERRIBLE EPIDEMIC A WIDOW'S GRIEF. FIRST opened my eyes upon " this goodly frame, the earth," on September 12, 1851, in the little frontier village of Aylmer, Province of Quebec, or Lower Canada, as it was then called. How I happened to be born in the, Queen's Dominions, rather than in the old Bay State where my ancestors had lived for more than two centuries, will appear a little later. At that time Aylmer was very near the confines of civiliza tion. Vast and almost untrodden forests stretched to the north and the west. The town itself was of considerable im portance, the seat of a court-house, a jail, and three or four churches, and was the largest village in that vicinity. The city of Ottawa, now one of the most beautiful and flourish ing capitals in the world, was then called Bytown, and a lum bering stage-coach every day ploughed through the mud of spring, or the dust of summer, or the driving snows of winter between Aylmer, the metropolis, and Bytown, the suburb. The tables have long since been turned, however, and now Aylmer is the suburb and watering-place of the beautiful capi tal with which it is connected by a fast trolley line. My earliest memories are connected with the mighty Ottawa River, on whose banks Aylmer is situated, and the great rafts, sometimes twenty acres in extent, which went floating by day CHERRY COTTAGE My birthplace, or else the home to which I was moved when a few weeks old. Built by my father in 1850 or 1851, now to be used as Presbyterian manse. ¥:':, ' y MY FATHER 13 after day in the spring time. On these rafts whole families would live for weeks at a time, as they came slowly down the mighty current, for the Ottawa at Aylmer spreads out into a lake three miles wide. It was this great river, with the vast virgin forests which lined its banks, and extended for hundreds of miles into the interior, that led my father, Charles Carey Symmes, to leave his home in Winchester, Mass., and to seek his fortune in the untamed wilderness. Other enterprising young men of the Symmes family, and still others of the names of Wright and Eddy from Mass achusetts, had preceded him. It was intended at first, doubtless, as a temporary migra tion for business purposes, and my father was always an American citizen, so that when I came to be of voting age I did not have to be naturalized. My father's business was that of a civil engineer and timber locater, and his duties re quired him to spend weeks and months at a time in the heart of the wilderness, locating the claims of the owners of these vast forests. His companions were largely French Canadians and Indians, and I have learned that he was a great favorite with his men, friendly, ,and good-natured, and always ready to help them in an emergency. The hardships of such a life would be unendurable by men of softer stuff, for it involved long marches, days spent in toil, and nights often with only the blue sky for a tent. The winters in those northern latitudes, when most of his work in the forests had to be done, were appallingly cold, the tem perature sometimes marking fifty degrees below zero, so that the mercury in an ordinary thermometer would freeze solid, and could be fired like a bullet out of a gun ; — a novel use of quicksilver, once made by my father, as I have been told. To this frontier home in Aylmer my father took his young bride, Lydia Fletcher Clark, to whom he was married on November 10, 1840. She was the third daughter of the 14 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Deacon Oliver Clark of whom I have before spoken, and in her veins ran some of the blood of the Daniel Webster family. Because of this she was given jher middle name of " Fletcher." Daniel Webster's oldest son bore the same name. Here I may as well stop to explain how my name happens to be Clark while my father's was Symmes. Before I was three years old my father died, and my mother before I was eight. At her request I was adopted by my uncle, her brother, Rev. Edward Warren Clark, for whom I was named, so far as my middle name is concerned. He was perhaps her favorite brother, and when she died, and at her request, I was legally adopted by him. To save complications and mis understandings, which seemed to me far more important as a boy than they would now, my name was legally changed to Francis Edward Clark by the " Great and General Court of Massachusetts." Old people in Canada still remember the terrible visita tion of cholera which devastated the Province in 1853— 1854. My father's business called him to Three Rivers, a large town on the St. Lawrence River, midway between Montreal and Quebec. The dreadful plague was at its height, having been brought from the Old World by the immigrants who were then flocking- into the new. Hundreds of them died before they reached their destination. On a St. Lawrence steamer my father travelled with the infected immigrants, many of whom, from time to time, after a brief struggle with this frightful disease yielded to it and were immediately buried. I have heard it said (and, from his general character I believe the story is true) that he attempted to take care of some of these poor creatures and to assuage their sufferings. Just be fore reaching Three Rivers he himself became a victim to the same disease, and a few hours after being put on shore, so swiftly does the virulent poison work, he died, far away from his wife and children. His older brother, Henry, however, was able to be with him MY FATHER 15 in his dying hours, and he is buried in the little Protestant Cemetery of Three Rivers. His comely marble monument, when I first saw it, many years after his death, was shrouded almost to the top in the deep Canadian snow. However cold his tomb, I believe that one of the warmest and noblest hearts beat beneath his breast. He died on August 4, 1 8 54, shortly before my third birthday, and it is not strange that I do not remember him at all. Unfortunately this was before the days of photographs, and even ambrotypes were rare, so that I have never been able to find a picture of my father. I cannot better close this chapter than by quoting a sentence or two from my mother's journal, written, as she supposed, only for her own eyes. She had reached Three Rivers shortly after his death, but not before his interment had become nec essary. Again four years afterwards she made another pil grimage to his grave and wrote as follows: " I kissed the dear sod that covered him, and seemed almost to feel his loving arms about me." ..." Four years ago today my beloved husband died. Oh, the sad, sad day, my beloved Charles, husband of my youth, thy kind and loving heart, that ever throbbed with love to wife and children, stilled on that sad day its beatings! Beloved of my heart, could I but have seen you, could I but have imprinted one kiss on that dear brow, could I have felt the pressure of those dear hands, and heard the last loving farewell! But it was not the will of my heavenly Father, and He doeth all things well ; and though it seems dark and mysterious now, I am persuaded that I shall one day see that it was all for the best. Though our heavenly Father afflicts, yet He is a God of love, and oh! my soul, forget not all the blessings with which thy days have been crowned since that dark, sad day. Thou hast had health and strength. Thy children have been blessed with health. They are virtuous, intelligent, and happy. Thou hast been blessed in thy labors, so that thou hast not lacked for food or raiment. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies." Chapter III Years i 8 14-1858 MY MOTHER her girlhood her education under mary lyon her character her wonderful journal her struggle for self-support my brother charles — Charlie's death. SUPPOSE most men think that their mothers were the best and noblest women who ever lived. I certainly share that opinion with other loyal sons, and believe that my esti mate is not based solely upon partiality and affection. The testimony that has come to me from relatives and friends, and above all the testimony of her private journal, which I shall always thank God was pre served for me, tell of a woman unusually gifted in intellect and disposition, while the ambrotype which I have since had enlarged speaks to every one who sees it of a peculiarly sweet, serene, and gentle nature. For the sake of personal friends and relatives, and for the larger circle of those who would learn how to bear affliction and unusual sorrows with a calm trust and beautiful resigna tion, I have published some parts of this journal in book form for private distribution, and I cannot perhaps do better than to quote in this chapter some paragraphs from this jour nal which especially reveal this character, and also from the preface in which I have told something of her life. I have received, literally, hundreds of testimonies from those who have read this little volume, telling of the comfort 16 THE OLD CLARK HOMESTEAD IN TEWKSBURY, MASS. Where my Mother and Adopted Father were born. MY MOTHER I 9 it has given them, of the new sense of the Father's presence in the midst of their own afflictions, and of the new revela tion it has been to them of how a Christian may live and die. Of course her journal was not written for publication, — far from it, — my mother probably never thought that even her own children would read it, for otherwise she could not have poured out her heart so frankly and ingenuously. She seems to be simply talking with herself and her God as she writes. But after these nearly seventy years I am betraying no heart secrets in quoting some of it, and if it can help others to a higher Christian life, she herself would have me use it in this way. But first a few words about her life. Lydia Fletcher Clark was born September 30, 18 14, and was noted even in her girlhood for a peculiar faculty of en dearing herself to family and friends. Brought up in the old New England regime, her father a Puritan deacon of the old school, a regime sometimes thought to have been stern and narrow, herself one of the older sisters in a large family of children, she added to sweetness, strength, and to gentleness, nobility of character, and to winsomeness, womanliness, and to innocent purity, unselfish love to God and man. Even in these early days Lydia Clark was noted, not only for her gentleness and strength, but for a certain poetic gift to which her journal testifies, which led her partial brothers and sisters to call her " Mrs. Sigourney the Second." - Mrs. Sigourney was then the fashion, and was considered a much greater poetess than future times have been willing to admit, so that then the compliment was a more thorough-going one than it seems after the lapse of three-score years. Another formative influence of value in her life was her school life under the celebrated Mary Lyon, the foremost woman whom America has produced, in the old Academy at Ipswich, Mass., before Mount Holyoke Seminary was founded. I long preserved a diary, bound in an old bit of 20 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS newspaper, written in my mother's school-girl hand, recording the words of Mary Lyon at chapel exercises. This diary I afterwards gave to Mount Holyoke College. At about the age of twenty-five she married, as already re lated, the man of her choice, Charles Carey Symmes, and her life poem grew in depth and beauty and heart melody. It was, apparently, a perfect union of hearts. No harsh word, no unkind act, ever marred it, as she herself has declared, and it lasted, in all the intensity of its love and devotion, far beyond the grave. I have already related how my father took his bride to the village in the wilderness on the banks of the Ottawa. Here their children were born. Charles Henry, Edward Carey, Katherine Noel, Francis Edward. Edward and Katherine died in infancy, but the eldest and youngest lived to grow up, the eldest a remarkable boy whose story of joyous life and triumphant death is told in the latter part of my mother's journal. The happy years flew by, — happy in spite of the two little mounds in the Aylmer churchyard: happy in spite of the fact that the loved husband was away from home much of the time, in the wilderness among the savage beasts and savage men, hewing a way for civilization. The beautiful wife and mother interested herself in the affairs of the little town, took an active part in church life and the primitive society of the place, and left her impress, the impress of a sweet, womanly, Christlike nature, upon all whom she touched. She spent one winter in Berthier, another frontier town of Quebec, and here, true to her instincts, at once began to make her little world brighter and better. Her light could not be hid; it shone as brightly in the wilderness as in the city. Full forty years after she left Berthier an old woman came to me one day with a worn, battered, old-fashioned Sunday-school book in her hand, saying, " Your mother formed the first Sunday school in Berthier. She collected a library for us, MY MOTHER 21 and we have cherished those books ever since because they came from her." She was only a few months in this little log-house metropolis, but the impress of her life is felt to-day. Winters and summers sped away, bringing their alternate varied sunshine and cloud. There were many partings in the little cottage at Aylmer, as the loved and loving husband fre quently set out for " the bush " on his long surveying and lumber-locating expeditions, but then there were just as many home-comings and happy reunions, when, for a few days or weeks, all too brief, the family at Cherry Cottage (for this was the name of the little house my father had built) was reunited again. Just as many home-comings? Alas! there was one less, for once in the summer of 1854, the husband kissed his wife and left their home for the last time. It was the fatal cholera year. Old inhabitants still recall it with a shudder. The dread disease, imported from Europe with the immigrants as I have related, secured a dreadful and sudden grip upon the New World. I have already given some details of my father's death, and of my mother's hurried journey to Three Rivers only to find her beloved one buried from her sight. She soon returned to the lonely home in Aylmer and to her two fatherless boys. But now we see the noblest part of a noble life, the four years and a half of struggle for independence that ensued. She had not come from sturdy New England stock for noth ing. The blood of the Puritans, who loved independence, personal, financial, religious, and political, flowed in her veins. She had not gone to Mary Lyon's school in vain. Necessity was laid upon her, and in meeting this necessity in the spirit of cheerful courage and abounding love to God and his children she found her great opportunity. She opened a private school. Pupils flocked to Cherry Cottage. They could not pay much, and she did not ask much; but enough to keep body and soul together, to pay her modest 22 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS bills, to keep her children with her, and to provide something for the education of the older one. A few boarding pupils added to her slender income. Cherry Cottage became the centre of mirth and youthful good spirits, — ¦ good spirits which were never unduly re pressed by the gentle mistress, — as well as the centre of studious habits and noble character building. A second Mt. Holyoke was started in the wilds of Canada — on a very small scale, it is true, and with a very modest prospectus and My Mother curriculum, but a second Mt. Holyoke, because a spirit kin dred to, and the peer of Mary Lyon, presided there. More than three years passed away. Of the last two the journal tells in simple, eloquent, and pathetic words. One more great billow was to pass over this patient soul. Her son Charles grew up to be a manly, strong, wholesome, fun- loving, but gentle boy, the kind of boy that ripens into a true gentleman. Far and away the best scholar in his class at school, he was a boy who was not ashamed to help his mother in the kitchen and the garden. An earnest, active Christian and communicant of the same Presbyterian church with her, MY MOTHER 23 mother and son walked hand in hand. At first he leaned the more heavily upon her; but, as he grew toward manhood, the weight began to shift, and she found herself leaning upon the strong, filial arm of Charles the son, as she had before leaned upon the arm of Charles the father. He never disappointed her, but returned love for love and answered unselfish care with a care as unselfish as the mother's. Daily he grew to be her pride, her support, her joy. He de veloped literary tastes and gifts, and a long story of much merit, but which in his modesty he afterwards burned, was written by him. His future was full of the largest promise, as his present was of the largest comfort to all around him. He was almost seventeen, but care and responsibility seemed to have added half a dozen years to his age. He was a full-grown man in ability to share his mother's burdens, though still a child in his tender love, when, suddenly, after a few days of illness from typhoid fever, this staff was taken from the frail woman, and the mother-heart was wrenched from its last earthly support. So much has been foolishly written in derision of precocious young saints that have died in their teens, and of their death-bed scenes, that I hesitate to print the account from my mother's journal of the last hours of my brother Charles. It must be remembered that he was not only an earnest Chris tian, but one of the most natural and healthy-minded of boys. There was nothing sickly or morbid in his disposition; his life was not only natural but even exuberant in its gayety. " I will write a short account of my dear boy's sickness and death," writes my mother in her journal, " it may at some time be gratifying to his little brother if he is spared." After describing at length the earlier days of his illness, , she continues, " Once as he lay upon his bed, he said, ' Mother, I think this sickness will do me good.' I said, 'Why, my son? ' thinking he meant physically. He answered, ' I have had a great many good thoughts, since I have been sick. I think I see better what life is for; at 24 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS all events, I shall know how to sympathize with those who are sick.' Sometimes he spoke of the time when he should be better able to earn some money for me. Sometimes he would say, ' Perhaps God has sent this illness to teach us to be more grateful for our continued health.' But he always spoke as though he thought his own sufferings very light compared with others. . . . " Early on Sabbath morning' I became calm enough to ask him if he were willing to die if God saw fit. With great emphasis he replied, ' I am willing to go this minute if God wills.' I said, ' But would you not rather stay with mother? ' ' Of course, mother, I would rather stay and help you if My Mother The older boy is my brother Charles. I am in the centre. God were willing.' I said no more then, except to ask him if he were happy, to which he replied, ' Perfectly happy.' "About six a.m. the doctor came; and the moment he looked at him he said, ' Oh, Charlie, you are going to leave us.' He looked up and said, ' I am perfectly content, doc tor. I am very happy.' The doctor wept like a child; and as he stooped to kiss the dear boy, Charlie said, ' Good-by, doctor1, I am very happy.' Turning to. me he said, ' We shall meet in heaven, mother. I shall see dear papa before you do.' Then again, ' God will be with you, mother.' To his little brother whose heart seemed breaking, he said, ' Frank must be a good boy; he must be a Christian. Oh, it is a glorious thing to be a Christian.' MV MOTHER 25 " Many of his young companions had assembled in the room and were weeping around the bed. They came up one by one, and he kissed them and bade them good-by as calmly and composedly as if he had been going a short journey. "When he had bid them all good-by I said, 'Will you bid me good-by now? ' ' Oh, no, mother,' he said, ' I will bid you good-by a good many times yet.' He asked me what day is was. I said the Sabbath. ' Blessed Sabbath ! ' he ex claimed, ' Is it not a glorious death? Are you not satisfied, mother; are you not satisfied? ' I asked him once, ' Are you afraid to die, my son? ' 'Oh, no,' he replied with em phasis; then as if fearing I might think him self-confident, he added, ' I know that I have done a thousand things that were wrong, but I am sure God will forgive me '; then hesi tating as if for breath, I added, ' through the merits of Jesus Christ.' ' Amen,' he responded, in a clear full tone. At another time, he said, ' Don't be at much expense about the funeral, mother, it will not help me any.' At another time he said, ' I couldn't write your epitaph, mother.' The last words I could catch from his dying lips were, ' Almost home.' Thus died my beloved son before he had completed his seventeenth year, ripe for heaven. O my son, my blessed, blessed son! " Perhaps I may be permitted to call attention to some striking mental and spiritual traits which my mother's journal reveals, and which have been a source of inspiration and courage to many who have read it. Her gratitude and thanksgiving for small mercies, as she recorded them for her own eye only, impress me most pro foundly, and rebuke my own ungrateful life. Many a woman in her circumstances would have thought she had very little cause for gratitude. A widow thrown in early life upon her own resources; a family to support by the hard, grinding life of a schoolmistress; far from her childhood's home and hun dreds of miles from most of her relatives and early friends, in a remote though not inhospitable frontier village; — what had she to be peculiarly grateful for? Yet almost every entry is a psalm of thanksgiving. In the l6 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS smallest occurrence she found evidence of God's peculiar goodness. The ability to lay in a winter's supply of wood, the pay ment of a just debt by one of her scholars, the kindness of a blacksmith who mended some kitchen utensils for her, the thoughtfulness of a neighbor in putting a load of tanbark under a loose foundation to keep out the cold, the faithfulness of the kitchen-maid, a kind note, a pleasant call, — all fill her heart with gladness and her lips with praise, and cause her to cry out, " Bless the Lord, O my soul ! " Let me transcribe a few lines: "February 7, 1857: I see much, very much, to be thank ful for.. Almost every one has paid his bills, and I have been able to pay all I owe, and have a little left. ... I received a kind note from Mrs. Symmes and a pleasant call from Mr. Thompson." How few would think such trivialities worth a grateful thought! Fewer still would think them worth recording as special mercies. " February 18 — . — To-day I was better, and this eve ning feel quite well. How much I have to be grateful for in my continued health! " "March 23. — To-day I paid for thirty cords of wood for next year's use. How thankful should I be that I have the means for my family when many a poor widow sees her children suffer with cold and hunger! To-day I received a letter from Mrs. S. with seven pounds for her daughter's board and tuition. Oh, for a grateful heart! " Most people would think the collection of a just bill that barely enabled her to live, hardly cause for a sigh of gratitude. "November 13. — How much have I to be grateful for that I am surrounded by temporal blessings at this season of the year! Let me enumerate some of them. I have a good comfortable house, an abundance of good, dry wood; I have MY MOTHER 27 on hand provisions sufficient or nearly so for three months, and my own health and that of my children is very good. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name." " October. — I have taken a new bedroom over the kitchen, which is very warm and comfortable. . . . Truly the Lord is good and will not suffer the soul of those who trust in Him to want." Could anything show more plainly the possession of the " merry heart " that doeth good like a medicine? All things earthly, too, seemed to remind her of their heavenly prototypes. Spring comes with its budding flowers and reminds her of " What heaven must be, where no thorns and briers intrude among the flowers and fruits that bloom in the Paradise of God? " The mild radiance of a summer night calls her thought beyond the stars, and, as she thinks of the loved one gone before, she cries out, " Oh, what exquisite scenery may he not now behold! My husband, my husband, when shall I join you? " But why need I quote more when every page, almost every line, breathes an other-worldliness, a heavenly peace, a joy in God, a sense of His presence and of the absolute reality of eternal things? Thank God for such a mother! Chapter IV Years i 856-1 869 MY BOYHOOD EARLIEST MEMORIES MY MOTHER'S DEATH GOOD-BY TO AYLMER BEAUTIFUL AUBURNDALE MEMORIES OF THE CIVIL WAR CLAREMONT ACADEMY DAYS. ?[} OME of my friends surprise me by telling me that their early memories go back to the |: time when they were only three years old, or to two and a half years, and they relate marvellous tales or traditions of being able to read the Bible before their fifth birthday. But not being a precocious boy, I have no such marvels to relate. Indeed my first distinct memory is connected with my fifth birthday, when, in honor of the event, my mother and brother, and some young ladies from my mother's school, took me out in a boat on the big Ottawa River, for an afternoon's excursion. I probably should not remember this were it not for the fact that the boat ran upon a submerged rock or a, shoal and was hung up for a little while, a circumstance which frightened me very much, although there was really no danger. Indeed, the memories of all my days in Aylmer look dim and hazy through the mists of more than sixty years. But they are all, with the exception perhaps of the little episode on the Ottawa River, and the death of my dear brother and mother, exceedingly pleasant ones. I remember no hard word or unkind speech or act in the little circle of Cherry Cottage. 28 MY BOYHOOD 29 Always the atmosphere was cheerful, and usually merry. My mother kept her sorrows and heartaches for her private journal and hid them behind its covers. I remember no gloom or suspicion of melancholy in the little circle. My brother, from all that I remember and all that I am told, was of an unusually frank and sunny disposition, a great favorite with the young ladies of the school, who contributed their full share to the joys of the household. Happy evenings with reading and music and cheerful games were the rule and not the exception, and the days were filled with wholesome work and study for all. Sundays were days of rest and worship, but by no means the gloomiest days of the week. In fact I believe they were the brightest and happiest of all, for then my mother had more leisure for her family. Though church and Sunday school always engaged her attention, yet there was an hour left for a quiet walk in good weather. All of my boyhood was spent in two Puritan fami lies, which to-day, in some circles, would be considered very strict; yet I have not the slightest recollection of a gloomy Sunday, or of any unhappy constraint in connection with the day. My mother and brother were members of the Presby terian church, in which I, too, was dedicated to God's service, and I had a few years ago the great honor and pleasure of placing a modest stained-glass window in this church in loving memory of them and of my father. The church was recently burned in a great fire that swept Aylmer, as I shall relate in another chapter. One early memory of church-going reminds me how cold were those Canadian winters, where the mercury, even in the towns, sometimes sank to forty degrees below zero, and more. Though our home was not more than five minutes walk from the church, I reached it one Sunday morning after church, with a frozen nose, to which a liberal application of snow soon brought a tingling circulation again. Another trivial early memory, which naturally left its impress. 30 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS In the later months of 1858 sad days came to Cherry Cot tage. Then came the sickness and death of the talented and courageous boy who had become his mother's staff and stay, as I have already related. From this shock and sorrow my mother never recovered, and in six months she followed him. She made many more entries in her journal, it is true, almost every one of which breathes the trust and hope, the gentle resignation and thanksgiving for little mercies that always characterized her. Indeed, they grew more and more deeply spiritual as little by little her bodily strength failed. The following are the last records that I find in her journal: "February 12. Sabbath evening. Another blessed Sab bath has gone. I have not been very well, but I went to the Sabbath school, but not to church. I hope I shall feel better to-morrow and have more energy. "February 15. Our good, kind doctor called to-day. It does me good to see him, he is so kind and sympathizing. I think I feel a little better to-day; the weather has been glori ous. I sat this eve and watched the calm and glorious sunset, and thought of my beloved boy in those mansions above, which our blessed Saviour has prepared for those who love Him." Here the beautiful record of the beautiful life ends. She gradually grew worse; could not even persuade herself that she felt " a little better "; until on March 26, 1859, the gentle spirit took its flight beyond the " glorious sunset " to the dear husband and the " beloved boy," and to " those mansions above which our blessed Saviour has prepared .for those who love Him." I remember the last kisses and blessings which she show ered on my little head, and then the labored, stertorous breathing, the silent room that followed, with the blinds closed and the shades drawn, the funeral procession to the little cemetery half way between Aylmer and Ottawa, where she lies beside her eldest son and the little children who were MY BOYHOOD 31 taken from life so early; the return to Cherry Cottage; the sympathy of kind neighbors and friends, of aunts and cousins, a number of whom lived in the vicinity, and the heart-breaking grief of a boy who now, though but little more then seven years old, had lost father and mother, two brothers and a sister, and was the only one left of the cheery Cherry Cottage family. I can hardly realize, as I write this, that I am already nearly thirty years older than the oldest one of my family circle when she died. My Adopted Father, Rev. Edward W. Clark Very soon after my mother's death, my uncle, Rev. Edward Warren Clark, of Auburndale, Mass., came to Aylmer to take me to his home. He was the favorite younger brother whom my mother had asked to take care of me in case anything should happen to her, a commission and a charge which he seems to have undertaken gladly, as he had no children of his own. My last days in Aylmer I remember with considerable dis- 32 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS tinctness; the leave-taking and the " good-by " to cousins and kindly neighbors and sympathetic friends. But my most vivid memory is of leaving Cherry Cottage, and giving a farewell kiss, not only to its inhabitants, but to different por tions of the house and gardens, which were particularly dear to me. As I could not kiss all the stones in the rocky yard, I remember bestowing a salute upon one little stone and throw ing it at the others, as a farewell token; and as the trees were too numerous for such osculatory demonstrations, one cherry tree received the embrace for all the rest. But in a child's mind new scenes soon chase away old im pressions if not old memories, and the journey to " the States," where I had been only once before, and that as a very little shaver, was a perfect kaleidoscope of new impres sions. From Aylmer to Ottawa, — then just beginning to as sume dignities which awaited it as the capital of a great Dominion, — from Ottawa to Rouse's Point we went, and from Rouse's Point to Ogdensburg. There we spent the night, and I was almost frightened out of the little growth I had already achieved by finding myself alone as I awoke in the middle of the night, my uncle having gone out to see a fire which was exciting the neighborhood. Thinking that I was being deserted by everyone, I was captured in a distant corri dor of the hotel by a kind-hearted chambermaid, who found me crying as though I had lost my last friend, as indeed I thought I had. But the fire was soon extinguished and with it my fears and anxieties on the return of my uncle, whose kindness and gentle consideration for the little orphan I shall never forget. Auburndale, which we reached the next day, was not the populous and beautiful village that it now is; nevertheless it was a lovely quiet suburb with maple-shaded streets, and many comfortable mid-Victorian homes of the pioneer commuters of Boston. My uncle was the first pastor of the newly-formed Congregational Church of the village. MY BOYHOOD 33 I cannot imagine a more ideal spot for a boy to grow up in. One of the old inhabitants used frequently to quote Gold smith's lines, beginning, " Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain," and apply them to the new Auburn — dale. A good school, good neighbors, with a sufficient quota of boys and girls in their families to provide chums for the newcomer; the My Adopted Mother A descendant of John Cotton and granddaughter of General Artemas Ward. Charles River to fish in, where the capture of a pickerel afforded joy and glory enough to last a week; the big city of Boston only a half hour away, where I was soon allowed to go on errands without any chaperon, — all these afforded a variety of joys sufficient to satisfy any normal boy. My aunt, who received me with a welcome as warm and loving as my uncle had given me, was an unusual woman in many respects, a descendant like myself of the Puritans of 34 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Boston, with the blood of John Cotton, Cotton Mather, and General Artemas Ward of the Revolutionary army, flowing in her veins. She was, perhaps, too insistent in earlier years that all around her should come up to her own high Puritan standard, but as the years went on she ripened and mellowed in a marvellously beautiful way, until when she died in my own home in Auburndale, nearly fifty years later, the most appro priate words which the officiating minister could find to base his funeral remarks upon were : " Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us," for in face and character all felt that the beauty of the Lord her God had long rested upon her. My uncle's health failed in early life. Indeed before going to Auburndale he had been obliged to give up the ministry for two years after his first -short pastorate in Reading, Mass., but in many ways he was of more than average ability. While in Auburndale he was elected chaplain of the Massachusetts Senate, and re-elected the next year, an unusual honor in those days, since previously the chaplain^ term had been but for a single session. This honor carried with it his election as Overseer of Harvard College, but both the chaplaincy and the overseership he laid down at his country's call, when, in 1863, he was asked to become chaplain of the Massachusetts Forty-seventh Regiment of Volunteers. This was a nine months' regiment, and his service in the army was conse quently brief, but sufficiently long greatly to injure his health, and he reached home after the regiment was mustered out, more dead than alive, and in the grip of the malarial fever then so prevalent in New Orleans where his regiment had been stationed. He was greatly beloved by the soldiers, and though in failing health, ministered to them physically as well as spiritually to the last. Under these circumstances the events of the Civil War naturally made a deep impression upon my childish mind. Indeed I remember begging earnestly to be allowed to go with him, pleading that I could at least black his boots and MY BOYHOOD 35 perform such services, if they would not let me be a drummer boy. I remember hearing the sad, indignant tolling of the bells when John Brown was hung. When Lincoln was shot I grieved as for my own father, going up into a little loft all by myself and bursting into bitter tears. It shows what a hold the great President had on the hearts of the people that even a fourteen-year-old boy (a rather tearless age) should cry. When before this the news came of the surrender of Vicks- burg and the Battle of Port Hudson, and these newspaper reports were supplemented by letters from " the Chaplain," it can be imagined how real and vivid were the scenes of those awful years of the Civil War. What favorites the war songs were with the boys and girls of those days ! " Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are march ing," " Tenting to-night on the old camp ground," " We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong," " When Johnny comes marching home," " They've grafted him into the army," and even that somewhat lugubrious ditty, " Just before the battle, mother," all fired our enthusiasm and patriotic zeal. We even roared out at the top of our little voices, " We'll hang Jeff Day,is to a sour apple tree." I am glad that this " hymn of hate " was the worst that we were allowed to sing, and I wish we had not sung that. As in these later years I visit the South, where many of my dearest friends sided with the " Lost Cause," I wonder at those days of bitterness and rancor, and rejoice that they are so buried in the kindly oblivion of the past that to-day the memory of those old songs excites only a smile. A few months after being mustered out my adopted father had sufficiently recovered his health to enable him to take another pastorate, this time at Claremont, N. H., one of the most thriving and beautiful towns of the old Granite State. Claremont will always be to me a name of happy memories, 36 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS not only because of the generous and comfortable home and kindly people, but because of the more spacious country at tractions of lake and river and field and forest. My adopted father was a genuine lover of nature, versed in bird-lore and tree-lore, a good shot, and a lover of tramps and out-door expeditions. All these qualities he found it easy to transmit to me, as we often sallied out together with rod and gun. There were few ponds within a radius of twenty miles that we did not visit, with the aid of " Billy," the parsonage horse, and no imaginable joy seemed to me greater than these ex cursions. The love of out-door life has remained with me to the present day, though the gun has been discarded of late years for the camera and the opera glass, for most of us grow more tender-hearted as we grow older. Another thing for which I have reason to be especially grateful to my foster father is the care he took to insure my progress in reading and English composition. The best books were always at my disposal, and the worst were kept out of my way. A limited amount of novel reading was allowed, and of Dickens, who was my favorite author, I was permitted to indulge in only one chapter, or at most two, in the course of a day. In still earlier years, next to " The Swiss Family Robinson," Grimm's "Household Tales" were my especial joy, and I became thoroughly intimate with " Rumpelstiltskin," and the little tailor (was it?) who killed seven flies and then went around with the legend on his hat band, " Seven at one blow." When, many years later I was attending a German National Christian Endeavor convention in Cassel, I took great pains, in memory of those early loves, to hunt up the abode of the Brothers Grimm, where these wonderful tales were written. The quaint old house is marked with a tablet, and well de serves to be. Remembering my own boyhood, I felt kinship with the little girl who once brought ten pfennigs to the MY BOYHOOD 37 Brothers Grimm, saying, " You said in your last story that if anyone did not believe that the tailor married the princess he must pay you a mark. Now I do not believe that a tailor ever, ever married a princess, but I haven't got a mark, so I have brought you ten pfennigs, and will bring you the rest when I get it." Surely no better tribute to the realism of a fairy story was ever paid than this. As I have intimated, my adopted father took special pains, not only with my reading, but with my writing also, and en couraged me to launch out in venturesome ways on the troubled sea of literature. Though he himself never wrote much for publication he had a fine taste for good writing and a re strained literary style. One result of this encouragement was my ambitious attempt at a novel when I was about twelve, in the style of " Pickwick Papers," then my beau ideal of literature. I do not think it ever got beyond the second chapter, where the hero made his debut among the Patago- nians. Whether he was slain and eaten alive, or got back with a whole skin to his native land, I do not remember, and very likely the plot did not develop to this extent. A more successful effort that I remember was a long letter of several pages to my father, urging him to allow me to camp out with some other boys on the banks of " Cold Pond," a dozen or so miles away. So skilfully did I array the argu ments in favor of the expedition and bring up the objections which I knew were sure to be raised, only to knock them down like other men of straw, that my letter proved successful in securing the coveted excursion, while it so pleased my father that he preserved it among his family memorabilia to his dying day, more than forty years later. I must not forget Mount Ascutney, glorious old Ascutney! which though on the Vermont side of the Connecticut, shows off to best advantage from Claremont on the New Hampshire side. Once a year, and sometimes twice we climbed to its top and spent the night in the little stone hut that crowned its 38 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS topmost peak. What excursions those were! Though only a dozen miles from Claremont, to climb Ascutney seemed a rarer privilege than it would be to cross the ocean and stand on the peak of Fujiyama to-day. Never was there such a delicious ice-cold spring as that which you will find half way up the mountain on the left-hand side of the path; never was there such a magnificent view over the New Hampshire hills and the Vermont valleys, which lay stretched at our feet. If you do not believe it, dear reader, climb Ascutney for yourself, but you must do it with a boy's eager heart, and fresh im pressionable imagination. The spiritual surroundings of the Claremont parsonage were as helpful as the intellectual and material. Family prayers night and morning, portions of the Bible to be studied and learned, were part of my daily life, and I do not remem ber that these seemed monotonous or unwelcome tasks. Ruskin has told us that the 119th Psalm, the longest in the whole book, was the severest task in memorizing that his mother ever demanded of him, but that he received more help from that Psalm than from any other chapter of the Bible, though he committed to memory many other difficult passages. I was not required to learn that Psalm, or any chapters in Second Chronicles, as was Ruskin, but I only wish now that I had made better use of my opportunities and learned many more. Every Sunday evening at the hour of family prayer I was expected to report both morning and afternoon sermons. I was naturally ambitious to give the longest and most ac curate report possible, taking notes in church for that purpose. It was a splendid exercise for the memory and for powers of expression, and for the intellect and heart as well. I commend it to modern parents. As a result of these wholesome religious influences, and moved, as I trust, by the Spirit of God, when thirteen years of age, I stood up, trembling and abashed, in the little prayer- MY BOYHOOD 39 meeting room of the Claremont church, and confessed my de sire to be counted among the followers of Christ. No evangel ist or season of religious excitement had brought me to a de cision, but religious training and conviction. While I believe heartily in revivals, and in many revivalists, and in special periods of religious awakening, I also believe that there is a place for the Timothy type of conversion as well as for the Pauline, and that Mother Eunice and Grandmother Lois may be as much used of God in bringing their children to Christ, as the most fiery and eloquent evangelist. The dingy little chapel of the Claremont church, now greatly altered and beautified, will always be a place of sacred memories to me. My school days at Claremont were mostly passed in a so- called academy, for it was before the days of high schools. This academy was of moderate pretensions, but some of the teachers were of marked personality, especially the principal, a Miss Chamberlin. After all, the personality of a teacher is worth far more than buildings of brick and mortar, school, books and blackboards, and all the paraphernalia of modern education. Miss Chamberlin's academy was a smaller copy of the oft-quoted college with " Mark Hopkins at one end of the log and pupils on the other." When little more than sixteen years of age my real academy days were begun, and one cold December day I drove with my adopted father to the hill town of Meriden, N. H., to be entered at a " middler " in famous old Kimball Union Academy, which was then one of the three largest and most important fitting schools in New England, with between three and four hundred students enrolled upon its catalogue. Meriden would not perhaps be considered the most attractive place in the world by a city boy, for it was and is remote from the railroad, with a lumbering stage-coach (now an auto mobile) connecting it with the outer world, and with only one new dwelling house built since the early days of the Civil War up to this time. 40 ' MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Nevertheless it had and has attractions all its own: — splendid scenery among the New Hampshire hills, green in summer and snow-clad in winter; Grantham Mountain and the Croydon Hills, Mount Ascutney, and the White Hills not far away; magnificent coasting in winter (for it is a village set upon a hill, a high and steep one at that), and glorious air and sunshine all the year round. Here too, the teachers, if not all peculiarly eminent for their scholarships, were men and women who knew how to im press themselves upon their students and bring out the best that was in them. Dr. Cyrus Richards, the long-time prin cipal of the school, was a Greek and Latin scholar of note throughout the country, who, if stiff and prim, and a martinet in some of his rules and regulations, was still one who com manded the respect of his students, and the impress that he left on their minds was always one of manliness and righteous ness. Rule twenty, which kept the boys and girls from speaking to each other, walking together, or if possible, from even casting sheep's eyes across the road, except on one or two red- letter days in the course of the year, would seem absurd enough in these days, but it at least fostered a respect if not reverence for the opposite sex, and never bred the contempt which the familiarity of the present day often engenders. If Kimball Union Academy were not a place for high think ing on the part of all the students, it was certainly a place for plain living; for corn mush and milk, baked beans and oat meal, meat two or three times a week, and " flap- jacks " that on certain memorable days appeared on the table, were the staples of our bill of fare. At a recent Alumni reunion of the school, the old boys and girls, in "reminiscing," told how the board bills in the late sixties, when we were specially extravagant, mounted up to $1.37 a week, while one white-haired old gentleman who had been a student in the early sixties, declared that at his club (for MY BOYHOOD 41 all students boarded in clubs with a commissary of their own choosing), the board bill amounted to eighty cents a week for a whole term. He remarked, parenthetically, however, that the landlady's pig was very lean that year, there being no scraps left over for it. Let no one think however, that we considered ourselves abused or half starved. We were healthy, hearty, and rugged, without a suspicion that we were not faring sumptuously every day, and we never imagined that we could be objects of pity on the part of ourselves or anybody else. At the end of less than two years, I was graduated with some small honors and, with twenty-five of my classmates, took the easy examinations which Dartmouth then imposed upon its Pcenes; the " Meriden delegation " furnishing more than a quarter part of the Dartmouth class of '73. The old school on Meriden Hill is comparatively flourish ing once more after a long period of depression, when it became almost extinct, and I am glad to give some little time each year to its interests, as chairman of the board of trustees, though others on the board give far more both of time and money, especially my classmate and intimate friend, Alfred Hall, Esq., of Boston. Meriden, in another way, is now being put upon the map, having become, through the efforts of Mr. Harold Baynes, the most famous bird town in America, with its " Bird Sanc tuary " and " Bird Plays," in which the daughters of President Wilson, when their summer home was in Cornish, half a dozen miles away, thought it worth while to take part. When a boy enters college, in his own estimation at least he leaves boyhood days behind, so I will close this boyhood chapter with my memory of that twelve-mile ride from Kim ball Union to Dartmouth for matriculation in the class of '73, whose fiftieth anniversary is close at hand. Chapter V Years 1869-1873 DARTMOUTH DAYS DARTMOUTH CENTENNIAL COMMENCEMENT CHIEF JUS TICE CHASE AND GENERAL TECUMSEH SHERMAN OUR PRESIDENT AND PROFESSORS PRIMITIVE DAYS AT DART MOUTH FRATERNITY LIFE LITERARY EFFORTS FOOTBALL IN THE OLD DAYS TEACHING SCHOOL WINTERS. WAS fortunate in entering Dartmouth Col lege at the beginning of the second century of that noble old New Hampshire institution, and the commencement of 1869, which I at tended as a newly fledged Pcene, was the most impressive perhaps which Dartmouth had ever known. That was in the days of the old-fashioned college commencements, which resembled a country fair quite as much as the graduation days of an institution of learning. The sideshow man was in full evidence; the man with the educated moose was there; the pop-corn man and the vender of pink lemonade were prominent on the campus; and if the Wild Man of Borneo, the Fat Woman and the Human Skeleton had been in that vicinity they would certainly have put in an appearance. Country people flocked from all the region round about, and many found greater entertainment in the booths on the campus than in the two dozen stilted com mencement orations of the young graduates in the college church, and I for one do not blame them. 42 DARTMOUTH DAYS 43 But there were other and more exalted entertainments on this occasion than either the campus or the college church afforded, for the Chief Justice of the United States, Salmon P. Chase, Dartmouth's most distinguished alumnus then liv ing, presided at the alumni gathering in a great tent pitched on the campus, which was also graced by the presence of Gen eral William Tecumseh Sherman, then comparatively fresh from the glories of the battlefield, and acclaimed as the second greatest general of the Union army. Of course Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate were eulo gized, as they have been at scores of commencements since their graduation. On this occasion the glorious things which were spoken of Dartmouth and her distinguished graduates were cut short by a tremendous shower of rain, which caused the Chief Justice of the United States, the Lieutenant-General of her army, and as many others as could possibly do so, to take refuge under the speakers' platform from the deluge that poured through the dry canvas. Alas, their last estate was worse than the first, for there were wide cracks in the platform, through which the rain poured upon their devoted heads, not in drops but in rivulets. If I remember rightly the shower soon abated and the exer cises proceeded to the end without curtailment, in spite of the damp and dripping condition of some of the principal speakers. Owing to the somewhat meagre preparations for the appetites of a crowd which was larger than was expected, and with ref erence to the principal articles on the. menu of the alumni dinner, the punsters declared that it was " merely a salmon, pea, chase." My real college life of course did not begin until the next September. Though some might dispute my views on this point, I also think that I have reason to congratulate myself that I was a college student of the olden times, when Dart mouth was a comparatively small college. She was a college with slender endowment, a very moderate equipment and with 44 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS few students according to the views of the present day, (when hundreds every year are trying in vain to enter her over crowded academic shades), but men of great hearts, command ing personality, lofty ideals and spotless characters graced the presidential and professorial chairs. Not that such men are not found to-day in Dartmouth and all our colleges, but the personality of the professors has been in a measure, I believe, overshadowed by the excellence of the equipment, while the introduction of some younger professors on the score of specialized and technical scholarship rather than of character, has made the moral and religious tone of many of our colleges far less dominant than in days of old. I cannot explain exactly what I mean unless I could intro duce to all my readers the president and professors of that ancient time. President Asa Dodge Smith was tall, impressive, courteous to the last degree, with a large expanse of shirt bosom, a long coat, and a well brushed silk hat always in evidence. Of course his suavity and his efforts to conciliate and please wherever possible, together with a middle name convenient to their hand, led the boys who had been disciplined, or who for some other reason did not like the president, to call him " The Artful Dodger " (Oliver Twist was then a special Dickens' favorite), but the great majority respected him, and those who knew him intimately loved him. Coming from an important New York pulpit, he brought with him a courteous dignity and grace which Dartmouth needed, but withal one of the warmest hearts that ever beat in a college president's bosom. I remember that several years before I went to college he was marooned by a New Hampshire blizzard in our Clare mont home, and that even then he inspired me by his gentle courtesy and personal interest with an unfaltering attention to matriculate some day as a Dartmouth freshman, an inten tion which he fostered by various letters and remembrances. It was currently reported that no man-child was born in a New DARTMOUTH DAYS 45 Hampshire home that Dr. Smith did not get his eye on as a prospective Dartmouth student. His kindness was continued throughout all my college course, and on one occasion at least, he talked with me very seriously about entering the ministry, and, before the inter view was ended, dropped upon his knees and prayed that I might be led to give my life to such service. I am glad that his prayer was answered, and that he preached the sermon when I was ordained and installed as pastor of Williston Church, in Portland, Maine. This was one of the very last acts of his life, for he was soon after taken ill, and within a few months went to his great reward. To think of a president of our great colleges of to-day praying with an individual student that he might be led into the ministry! Well I am afraid, that to some it might savor of the impossible, I hope not of the ludicrous. I am con vinced, however, that there would be more graduates from our universities in the ministry to-day if there were more Asa D. Smiths in the presidential chairs, though I admit that Dartmouth has had greater presidents in these later years. And then the professors! Their personality was scarcely less impressive than that of the president. Professor Edwin D. Sanborn, " Professor Bully " as every one affectionately called him, our teacher of English literature, what a noble character was his! Strong, rugged, tender, with a genuine appreciation and love for the best things of literature, he led his students to love them too. Professor Parker, at the head of the Latin Department, polished, winning, and courteous, became our highest ideal of what a Christian gentleman should be, while Professor Noyes, nervous and intense, but enthusiastic for his depart ment of moral philosophy and political economy, did not deserve the belittling name of " Peanuts " which was said to be derived from a story he once told of his " wild days " in college, when he went through " Bed-bug Alley " in Dart- 4-6 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS mouth Hall eating peanuts and saying " d ." Professor Charles Young was the most distinguished of our teachers in a scholarly way, and had already made Dartmouth's little observatory famous by his discoveries of the sun spots, and the spectrum analysis of the sun's rays. I remember, many years after graduation, when he had returned to Hanover to spend his declining days after a distinguished service at Princeton University, he tapped me on the shoulder, as he sat behind me on the platform, on " Dartmouth Night," and, assuming his old professorial voice, asked me sharply, " Clark, what is the distance from the earth to Mars? " I had not known that he was there, and his amazing question was enigmatical until I looked around and saw his smiling face and twinkling eye. Dr. John Lord, though not a regular professor, was a regu lar lecturer on history during my college days. His " Beacon Lights of History " are still standard books of which new editions are constantly appearing. His lectures were as inter esting as his manner was eccentric, and he sometimes scan dalized the other professors by lighting up his cigar after the lecture, almost before he had left the chapel door. He was the only one of our professors that indulged in the weed, so far as I know, and that indulgence was laid to his general eccentricity, and was condoned on that score. I remember hearing from an uncle of mine who was also his college classmate, an amusing story concerning him; — how in a class prayer meeting he was called on to offer prayer, all the students being upon their knees. Being somewhat ner vous and excitable he hitched his chair from place to place, until, when he was through, he was on the opposite side of the room from where he began. In the meantime he had uncon sciously tied his handkerchief round his knees, so that when all the others arose from their reverential posture, he was quite unable to do so until he was unbound. Professor Proctor, of the Greek chair, Professor Hitchcock DARTMOUTH DAYS 47 the eminent geologist, Professor Quimby, who took us through the intricacies of conic sections and the differential calculus, and the younger men, Tutors Lord, Emerson, and Chase all deserve mention, for each one had a " personality " that impressed itself upon the students. Our class of '73, owing doubtless to the glories of the centennial year, was the largest that had 1 ever entered Dart mouth College, and numbered, all told, with those who en tered later in the course, and counting the men in the Chandler Scientific Department, though for some unexplained reason they were not counted with the classicals in those days, fully 130 men, a very respectable number though scarcely a quarter part the size of the present Dartmouth classes. There were rough and tough men in the college classes of those days, men who drank and cursed and whose virtue was not immaculate. Many of these were weeded out in the early years of the college course, though some managed to graduate among the ninety or thereabouts who received their sheepskins on a hot June day in 1873. In spite of these men I am confident that the tone of the college as a whole was in those days earnest, sincere, and genuinely religious. Those were the days of compulsory chapel and compulsory church, which we took for granted as we did the precession of the equinoxes. It never occurred to us that in a well-regulated col lege anything less could be demanded, while the class prayer meetings, though of course entirely voluntary, were usually attended by fully half of our class, most of whom took part briefly, according to the present Christian Endeavor custom. I am not sure that these class prayer meetings did not give me my first idea of what a church young people's society might be. At any rate, I know that they were the most stimulating religious feature of my college life, where, with other Christian classmates, I in some way declared myself, week after week, as on the side of Christ. In the midst of our college course a genuine revival of 48 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS religion occurred, as was usually the case in those days at least once in four years. Some of the strongest men intel lectually and socially in my class as well as in the other classes were thoroughly converted. It can well be imagined how this revival rejoiced the heart of President Smith, a religious awakening in which he and his daughter Sarah, and several members of the faculty, took a prominent part in personal work for the students. No Dartmouth student of my generation and of many that preceded and followed, for a generation of students is only four years in length, will forget Dr. Leeds, the pastor of the College Church; scholarly, solemn, and uncompromising in the pulpit, but the very soul of geniality in his own honie. This parsonage home and the homes of many of the professors were genuine havens of refuge in the limited social life of Hanover, for all the students who would avail themselves of their privileges, and largely made up for the lack of other social attractions which city colleges are supposed to enjoy. Freshmen fraternities, which have since been abolished, were then in vogue, and it was not till the beginning of my sopho more year, according to the custom of that day, that I was initiated into the Zeta Chapter of the Psi Upsilon Fraternity, following in this respect in my adopted father's footsteps, for he was a charter member of the Zeta Chapter, and followed by two of my sons in the classes of 1901 and 19 12 respectively. I was tempted to become an Alpha Delt, through a generous invitation urgently presented by a senior who afterwards be came the president of the largest theological seminary in America, but family considerations prevailed, and of course neither in college days nor since, have I been willing to admit that any fraternity could be seriously compared with old Psi Upsilon. But those were modest days for college fraternities, as for' other college housings. We had no elaborate building with lounges and fireplaces and luxurious paraphernalia, but hired DARTMOUTH DAYS 49 a modest room in the old " Tontine," Hanover's one business block. Yet the fraternity spirit in those days was most admirable. It was a rare and genuine fellowship that was promoted, and a clean, sensible and serious view of life as well. A profane oath, or a glass of " booze " it was felt would have desecrated the sacred precincts of the fraternity hall; the meetings were opened with prayer, and a banquet provided by a local caterer once a year was the extent of our convivialities. Much time and thought were put into our literary exercises, which were held every week, and the debates and papers fur nished almost the only opportunity for practice in speaking and literary effort. Among other happy memories I recall a visit to the Amherst chapter as a Zeta delegate to the annual conven tion of 1872, and, as - - of the fraternity, (how near I came to revealing an unrevealable secret!) I had much to do with the entertainment of the convention at Dartmouth the next year. This convention, like the previous one, passed off gloriously, though I remember that some of the brothers from the city colleges were inclined to turn up their noses at our country ways and country roads, when we took them for a ride to the Shaker settlement at Enfield. I suppose that most college students to-day, whether from the country or city, would regard the surroundings of Dart mouth in the early seventies as exceedingly crude and primi tive. We carried up our own water from the old-fashioned pump on the campus, and our own coal and wood from our private stock in the cellar. We chose our commissary and boarded in a so-called " club," making our bills of fare to suit our purses, few of which ever knew any superfluous cash. Dartmouth was then a poor man's college and drew its con stituency largely from the New Hampshire farms, with a con siderable contingent from Massachusetts, and a sprinkling from the West. Dartmouth men have always been famous for sending their sons back to the old college. 50 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS I may be allowed an old graduate's privilege, I am sure, to cherish the fond belief that just as strong, vigorous, and suc cessful men were turned out in the days of the college pump and the kerosene lamp as in the modern times of shower bath and electricity. I am tempted at this point to tell far more than my space will allow concerning my college mates and classmates, and as I think of Jack and Fred and Sam and Rich and Tom and Jim and Alf and George and Judge and remember the distin guished lawyers and ministers and professors and college presidents who would have to answer if I called the roll to day. I find that it would be quite impossible, within the limits of this volume to tell what I would like concerning them. But these distinguished men were all there in embryo in that little New Hampshire village, and I could name scores of them who have made their mark upon their day and generation. I was attacked by a genuine case of cacoathes scribendi, during my preparatory course at Meriden and it became more virulent during the college days at Hanover. How well I re member my first published article. It appeared in the Man chester Mirror, a weekly paper, during my early academy days, and related to the mysteries of the planchette, which was then exciting superstitious people and amusing saner ones. How I hugged that paper to my bosom! a volume of five hundred pages would seem far less important now. But my pride took a tumble, as pride usually does, when I wrote to the editor and asked for payment for the article, and re ceived his reply saying, that he could buy any number of such articles for fifty cents apiece, and thought that the copy of the paper he had sent me was a quite sufficient reward. However, I was not entirely discouraged from hoping that I could sometime earn my living with my pen, and, during my college course, made various other essays in the same direction. A number of articles published in the,- Old Curiosity Shop, a Boston magazine of somewhat ephemeral life, brought DARTMOUTH DAYS 51 me in over one hundred dollars in the course of one year. I hope that my contributions did not hasten the death of the magazine, which expired the following season. These literary efforts, I suppose, were the cause of my election as one of the editors of The Dartmouth Magazine during my senior year, and also of a short-lived college weekly called The Anvil, which was started by a brilliant classmate, Fred Thayer by name, who afterwards served his apprenticeship on the Inde pendent and the New York Times, and whose untimely death was mourned by all soon after he entered the ministry. My first book, entitled " Our Vacations," though it related largely to the excursions and out-door life of college days, was not published until my junior year in Andover Seminary. What wonderful excursions those were! Two weeks in the White Mountains with half a dozen classmates at the close of sophomore year was a fortnight ever to be remembered. We walked from Hanover through the notches of the White Hills and the Franconias while an old horse and an impromptu prairie schooner which was just as good for the mountains as for the prairies, carried our tent, our blankets, and our cook ing-kit. The yearly excursion of the newly fledged juniors was a regular feature of those college days, and was perhaps the progenitor of the famous " Outing Club " which has helped to make Dartmouth the great out-door college of the country. Stories of other vacation weeks spent with classmates at Nahant and Cohasset on the Massachusetts shore, and excur sions to the Maritime Provinces and Quebec, during which I was able to pay my expenses by correspondence for certain Boston papers, made up the substance of this little book, which, even in these days, I sometimes see kicking around, forlorn and neglected, on the ten-cent counters of second-hand book shops. I must not forget to record the unique experience of the Dartmouth men of the olden days as student pedagogues. 52 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Massachusetts in general, and Cape Cod in particular, were quite overrun with college boys who were practising on the unsuspecting youths and maidens of the Old Bay State. Six weeks' vacation in mid-winter was the rule for Dartmouth in the early seventies, while students who wished to teach were al lowed six weeks more at the beginning of the spring term, whose studies they were not obliged to make up. As a matter of fact almost every boy either taught or told the faculty that he "wanted to teach," so that Hanover was a particularly lonesome place during the three months from January to April. During my freshman year I taught in Topsfield, Mass., and in the sophomore winter in the adjoining town of Boxford, and during both of these winters had the privilege of living much of the time alternately in the charming homes of two of my uncles who had married sisters of my mother, and were spending their declining years in Boxford, a town which enjoys the unique distinction, according to a late census, of having exactly the same number of inhabitants as in the days of the Revolutionary War. The same winter that I taught in the first district of Box ford where the classes ranged all the way from the a,b, abs, to the beginners in Algebra, " Sam McCall," recently a dis tinguished congressman and Governor of Massachusetts, taught in another district, and an eminent professor of New Testament Greek, Fred Bradley, (I give them their old-time names), in still another. Who imagined in those days that " Sam " and " Fred " would occupy these chairs? At the end of my sophomore year the teaching privilege was taken away from Dartmouth students, or at least the winter vacation was cut short, and all were obliged to make up for lost time, so that few were able to replenish their lean pocket- books by the meagre twelve-dollars-a-week salary for school teaching, and few Dartmouth boys thereafter made love to the Cape Cod maidens, or pitched the unruly big boys of their DARTMOUTH DAYS 53 schools into the snow drifts, an athletic feat for which the huskiest were frequently chosen in the earlier days. While it would seem absurd to-day to take so much time out of a college course, I am not at all sure that those twelve weeks of teaching were not quite as valuable as any twelve weeks of being taught, and they at least enabled many a poor boy to finish his college course without too large a debt. Our college was not visited by as great a number of dis tinguished men as at present, yet we had a course of lectures every winter, for those were the days when the " Lyceum " flourished, and the voice of the orator was heard in the land. Who was the lecturer among the coterie of Boston wits who declared that F-A-M-E spelt " Fifty And My Expenses "? I am inclined to think that it was Edward Everett Hale, though I remember that when I had something to do with the college lecture course, he decided that one hundred dollars was about the right stipend for him. It seemed to us a large sum, but when he explained that he could earn as much by staying at home and writing articles we concluded that we must have him, " irregardless " of expense. In those days we heard W. H. H. Murray, the brilliant meteor that flashed across the theological sky in Boston and soon went out in darkness. He gave us his tirade against " Deacons," with special ref erence to Park Street Church deacons. He was at that time also editor of The Golden Rule, and I little thought that I should follow him in the editorial office and actually inherit the wooden chair with a collapsible writing table on which he wrote his sermons and editorials and Adirondack yarns. Theodore Tilton, too, about the time of his memorable con test with Henry Ward Beecher, came to enlighten us about our political duties, and, if I remember rightly, he advised us to vote for Horace Greeley. I recall, also at one commencement time, seeing the good gray poet, Walt Whitman, shuffling down the main street of Hanover, where he had come to deliver a commencement 54 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS poem. He wore a blue flannel shirt open at the neck, his voice was muffled, and I could not hear his poem and probably could not have understood it if I had heard it, but I remember that as I afterwards passed him on the street he gave me a gruff but hearty " good morning." My Psi U connections gave me the privilege of writing to the celebrated essayists, Brother E. P. Whipple, Brother Charles Dudley Warner, and others, asking for poems or ad dresses for convention days. I did not expect to get them, but it enabled me to secure some treasures for my autograph album. Charles Dudley Warner, I remember, whom I had modestly asked to write a poem to grace some occasion for his younger brethren, replied that he had never written a poem in his life and would have to decline " with thanks and tears." While teaching school in Boxford I drove one bitterly cold night with Bradley to Lawrence to hear Wendell Phillips lecture on " The Lost Arts," a lecture which he gave some hundreds of times, and always with rare effect. I shall never forget that tall, graceful form surmounted by a splendidly symmetrical head, or that mellifluous voice which was rarely raised above the conversational tone, but always conveyed his exact meaning with a nicety of expression, which the orator who tears passion to tatters never knows. The anti-slavery cause was indeed favored by the advocacy of America's great est orators and writers, and none was greater than Wendell Phillips. Thus passed my college days, days which are always more likely to make a more imperishable impression on a boy's memory than any others. For the benefit of a few old Dart mouth men, who may possibly honor me by reading these pages, I would say that I roomed, as some of them did, first in the Haynes house on the main street, then at Barney McCabes' where the library now stands, and for the last year in No. IO Reed Hall, with its splendid outlook over Balch Hill and to ward Moose Mountain. DARTMOUTH DAYS 55 How crude and unscientific the Dartmouth sports of those days would seem to a baseball fan or a football enthusiast of to-day! Baseball was just beginning to be reduced to Medean and Persian laws, which were supplanting the " round ball " and " two old cat," of former days. Tennis was unknown, as well as basket-ball, and the football we played would to-day be considered a mere undisciplined scrimmage for the pigskin. Yet what rare fun was the old fashioned football, when half a dozen fellows would get out on the campus and shout with stentorian lungs: " Whole divisions! Whole divisions! " and the seniors and sophomores, the juniors and freshmen, would come streaming down from Dartmouth and Thornton and Wentworth and Reed and line up against each other for a furious combat! After "the warning" the man who could most often get the ball and do the most vigorous kicking was the best fellow. We never heard the mysterious numbers called out, or even knew the difference between a quarter-back and a half-back, but we were all in it, and no one thought of sitting on the bleachers while twenty-two men got all the exercise. The annual cane rush might perhaps be counted among the athletic sports of the day, and one of my most vivid memories is that of the tall, dignified, and portly form of President Smith in spotless garments, getting into' the midst of the fray, and shouting in classic phrase, " Disperse, young men, disperse to your rooms! " They finally dispersed, to be sure, after the sophomores secured the fragments of the cane, but not until the worthy president had been hustled (without the least in tention of course), and his polished silk hat ruffled, I fear, beyond repair. Those were rough old days in some respects when the fresh men's seats in chapel were once in a while drenched with a liberal supply of kerosene oil, and occasionally a corpse from the dissecting room of the Medical school was set up in their seats to frighten the new-comers fresh from their guileless $6 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS homes. We may congratulate ourselves that such " rough- housing " is a thing of the past. In the late days of June 1873, the seventy or more sur vivors of the classical department of the senior class were graduated, the Scientific students having a separate commence ment day. The commencement exercises were comparatively simple. We had no caps or gowns, but every senior who could afford it, and there were few who could not, sported a tall hat in memory, perhaps, of Daniel Webster. Nor were there any gorgeously arrayed trustees and distinguished alumni upon the platform, declaring by their fine colored feathers whether they were M.A.'s or PH.D.'s, D.D.'s, or LL.D's. But the commencement exercises always attracted a crowd, and each of the many speakers on the programme was as sured of the sympathetic and often tearful attention of a father or mother, or perhaps a sweetheart, in the gallery. The red ribbon of the Phi Beta Kappa was not as great a distinc tion perhaps in those days, for it was given to all in the first third of the class. Otherwise I might not be entitled to wear " the key," though I graduated, if I remember rightly number 12 in the class. The next day we separated, some to meet frequently, others occasionally at class reunions, but some never again. Of late years Dartmouth has wonderfully expanded, far outstripping its old rivals, and equalling Harvard and Yale in the number of its undergraduate students in academic studies. Freshmen classes of six hundred are the rule (all that the town can possibly accommodate), while fifteen hundred or more each year have to be refused admittance for lack of room. Dartmouth's great President, William J. Tucker, during his administration started this wonderful advance in numbers and equipment, and the present President Ernest Martin Hop kins, is his worthy and eminently successful successor. I am glad to have a son (Eugene Francis Clark) as secretary to the college and Professor in the Department of German. Chapter VI Years i 873-1 876 ANDOVER DAYS TWO GREAT THEOLOGIANS AND TEACHERS SERMON CLUBS MISSION WORK WHERE I MET MY FATE MY wife's FORBEARS. DID not fully make up my mind as to what my life-work should be until near the end of my senior year in college, when the de sires of my parents, the advice of President Smith, and above all my own convictions of duty, determined me to study for the min istry. I had been wavering between journalism, for which I had .much liking and perhaps a little aptitude, and the ministry, but the weightier sense of duty overcame boyish inclination. I must also acknowledge that it was an easier thing in those days for the graduate of an Eastern college to enter the minis try than it would be to-day, where prospective theological students are often looked upon at " Weirs." Andover was then the great theological seminary of New England, as it had been from the beginning, largely because it had been presided over by the greatest theologians of their time, a succession which perhaps reached the climax of its intellectual and spiritual strength in Professors Park and Phelps, who were then the presiding geniuses of the institu tion. That this pre-eminence was recognized by many outside of 57 58 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS the Congregational denomination was indicated by the fact that Phillips Brooks, then in the height of his commanding power as rector of Trinity Church, Boston, sent many young Episcopalians to Andover to obtain the foundation of their theological belief, though they usually finished at some Epis copal Seminary. Among these Episcopalian students was William Lawrence, now the beloved bishop of Massachusetts, and the immediate successor of Bishop Brooks. The younger brother of Phillips Brooks, John Cotton Brooks, was my class mate and roommate during my junior year, though he spent most of his nights in his Boston home. For many years and until his death, he was the rector of Christ Church, Spring field. In his seminary days he was a fellow of infinite jest and high spirits, and he could never settle down for a " go " at the Hebrew lexicon or grammar without first throwing all the sofa pillows in the room at my head. Of all the teachers whom I have ever known, perhaps I might say of all the men I have ever known, Professor Edwards A. Park was the most pre-eminent in his personality. It was no task to take his lectures. Students looked forward to them as to a rare treat, as they would to a lyceum lecture by John B. Gough or some other brilliant light of the lyceum plat form. Professor Park's logic was unanswerable if we accepted his premises, as most of us did without hesitation, and every lecture was lighted up by a rare humor, which never seemed to lose its edge as do the oft-repeated humorous interludes of many teachers. Professor Park's physical proportions were as impressive as his intellectual. On no other man did I ever see such a brain- dome. Yet his smile was as winning as a child's, and before a specially good story his mouth would pucker up charmingly and we knew that something extraordinarily good was coming. His humor was saved for his lectures however. In preaching he was serious, exalted, majestic. In hearing him we could imagine how Jonathan Edwards, from whom he was directly ANDOVER DAYS 59 descended, as his first name indicated, must have swayed his audiences. He preached his famous " Judas " and " Peter " sermons in Andover once every two or three years, and those were great occasions, not only for the students but for all the people who could crowd the old seminary chapel. In the earlier years of his connection with the seminary, when he was professor of Homiletics, he had the reputation of being unduly severe. I have heard my father tell about a Dr. Edwards A. Park Professor of Systematic Theology, Andover Theological Seminary. young man in his seminary class who preached a sermon on total depravity, taking the ground that every unconverted man was as bad as he could be, and using for his text the story of the swine that ran violently down a steep place into the sea and were drowned. Professor Park listened as patiently as he could to the end of the sermon, which was preached as a trial sermon before the students. The only criticism he made was, " I advise you, young man, to throw that sermon where the hogs went." 60 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS But whatever may have been Professor Park's pungency of rebuke in his earlier days, I never saw anything of it during my seminary course, nor ever heard a harsh word of criticism for any one of the students. His geniality and good humor were as marked in the home as in the classroom, and his quiet jokes will be long remembered. I recollect calling upon him a few years after graduation, when he related a story of how easily some men can be imposed upon by a solemn face. It was at the time of the American Board controversy over mis sionaries who believed in the possibility of a second probation, and there was some question about returning to his field Rev. Robert Hume, who harbored the possibility of some such hope for some heathen. " Yesterday," said Professor Park, " a caller asked me if I supposed the Board would send Mr. Hume back. ' No,' said I, £ they would no more send him back than they would send his uncle back.' " " Who was his uncle," said the caller. " Why, didn't you know," answered Professor Park, with his peculiarly serious and guileless expression, " that his uncle was David Hume, the great infidel historian? " "No," said the visitor in amazement, "was he? " The Professor enjoyed a hearty laugh over his visitor's credulity, imposed upon as he was, for the moment at least, by the professor's solemn air. It showed me also that the professor did not take Mr. Hume's case quite so seriously to heart as did some other defenders of the faith. It is needless to say that Mr. Hume was sent back, and became and is one of the most honored, beloved, and eminent missionaries of the American Board. It was inevitable that many stories, most of them probably apocryphal, should circulate in Andover about this professor. One of the most popular of these stories was to the effect that he turned up on one occasion, without any previous announce ment, in the classroom of a German professor, and that by his questions and the inevitableness of his logic he completely floored the theologian who at last refused to answer his ques- ANDOVER DAYS 6 1 tions. When asked afterwards who the stranger was he is said to have answered, " I don't know, but I think it was either the devil or Professor Park of Andover." A more likely story, which accords with the Professor's quiet New England humor, related that, when on a foreign hotel register he signed his name " Edwards A. Park, An dover," the hotel clerk desired to know where Andover might be. With solemn and weighty assurance Professor Park said impressively, " Sir, it is just seven miles from Tewksbury," a small town, chiefly noted for a great State almshouse. " Oh," said the clerk, " I was not aware of the location of your city." Professor Phelps's reputation was scarcely less than that of his distinguished colleague, but of a different sort. His choice English diction, a style that has never been surpassed by an American author, and his deep spirituality, made im pressive by a benignant, if somewhat sad face, impressed all who came under his influence. Professor Churchill, teacher of Oratory and Elocution, who in Professor Phelps's absence because of illness, read many of his lectures to us, was of a still different type, but was im mensely popular with the students. Genial, jovial, and kindly to the last degree, he won all our hearts, as well as golden opinions and golden dollars, by his inimitable public readings. He especially excelled in his portraiture of Dickens' characters, and was for many years one of the most popular men on the lyceum platform. Professor Thayer deserved the reputation of being one of the greatest Greek scholars in the country, but his exegesis was so minute and critical that in the seminary course we managed to study but very few chapters, and scarcely got an adequate idea of the teachings of the New Testament. Professor Egbert C. Smyth and Professor Charles M. Mead were also very widely known for their scholarship, though it was not of a popular character, and impressed only the like- minded scholarly few. 62 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS The intellectual life of Andover was stimulating, not only in the classrooms but in the student gatherings. The Rhetorical Society, familiarly known as the " Porter Rhet," was especially valuable for future sermonizers and preachers. The weekly critic neither gave quarter nor asked it. He often tried to see how completely he could flay the essays of the other men, and, when their turn came, their knives were always whetted for the scalp of the critic of the previous week. Yet it was all done good naturedly, and I never knew of any hard feelings that resulted. Our sermon clubs were another means of intellectual at trition, and every week we tried to prove the truth of Solo mon's proverb, as " iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." Many a sermon plan was consigned to the scrap-heap after it had been presented to the club, and many a beautifully finished discourse, the pet pro duction of the young theologue, was never preached after his classmates had had their say about it. I belonged to two of these clubs, one in my own class, and another in the class ahead of me, whose other members were Harry P. Nichols, later an eminent Episcopal rector of New York City, C. J. H. Ropes, for many years a well-known pro fessor in Bangor Seminary, and James L. Hill, a breezy Westerner, of whom I shall have occasion to speak later in these pages. The professors did not encourage the students to preach during the earlier years of their seminary course, though many strained the rules because of their desire to do good along the lines of their chosen profession, a desire accentuated, perhaps, by their lean pocketbooks. My first sermon, I re member, was preached in the old Presbyterian church at New Boston, N. H., and six services a Sunday since, have often tired me less than that maiden effort amid the New Hamp shire hills. " Were you not very tired after your long sermon?" said a Scotch parishioner to his pastor. "Ay, ANDOVER DAYS 63 mon," was the reply, " but it would ha' done ye good to see how tired the people were." I hope my audience was not as much exhausted as was the preacher; at any rate they asked me to come again and settle there, but it was too early in my seminary course to accept this invitation. Franklin, N. H., was another favorite " supply " for An dover students of those days, not only because of the fairly Harriet Elizabeth Abbott, Mrs. Clark As a school girl of thirteen in Abbott Academy, Andover, Mass. good honorarium, but because of the kindly audience and generous hosts, and when the theologues came back to An dover, they would tell with a conscious glow of satisfaction how a United States Senator was in the audience, and a rail road president started the wood fire in the air-tight stove in their room before they rose in the morning. Let us hope that a more august Presence still was in those audiences, and that 64 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS a benediction was left behind in the home of the Senator and the railroad president as well as of all others in the audience. My literary activities during my seminary course brought me in some money from St. Nicholas and other papers and magazines, and enabled me as a newspaper correspondent to take my adopted father on a vacation trip to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton, which we both greatly enjoyed. While in the Seminary my first book " Our Vacations " was published by Estes and Lauriat of Boston, and had a fair sale. Voluntary and unpaid mission work was not neglected by Andover students. It fell to my lot to teach a Sunday-school class in the Abbott Village Mission School, and here I met my fate, for another teacher in that same school was Miss Harriet Elizabeth Abbott, who taught the primary class, played the cabinet organ, and was generally the life and inspiration of the school. I shall not go into particulars or tell how on a rainy evening under the same umbrella, on our return from Abbott Village to Andover Hill, a question of very con siderable importance to us both was settled. As she is man ipulating the typewriter while I dictate these words, it has been difficult for me to write what I have already dictated and I am not allowed to say anything further on this head, except that now it is more than forty-seven years since that rainy March evening in Andover, and that I have thanked God more fervently each year for Abbott Village and Andover Hill. She will, however, allow me to add that her father was a pastor in Hampton Falls, N. H., and that her mother, for many years after her husband's death, mothered a multitude of students in the big square three-story house at the corner of Main and Phillips Streets in Andover. My wife's grandfather was for fifty years pastor of the old church in North Hampton, N. H., and was known and loved as " Father French " throughout the length and breadth ANDOVER DAYS 6 5 of the State. He brought up a family of eleven children on a salary of four hundred dollars a year, gave all his children a good education, and left to them and to his grandchildren a blessed memory. Her great uncle, Samuel Farrar, or " Squire Farrar," as he was generally called, was famous in Andover for his devotion to the seminary, of which he was treasurer for many years. He Harriet Elizabeth Abbott The girl I married, October 3,^1876. gave all his time, and eventually all his money to the seminary, and his benignant portrait can be seen in the " Farrar Room " in the splendid new Andover Hall at Cambridge. What the old gentleman would have thought of Andover's " new de partures," and of her close attachment to Harvard, to whose theology he was bitterly opposed, I will leave it to my readers to conjecture. 66 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY iANDS My future wife's descent on one side of the family was from that couple distinguished in song and story, John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. I have always rejoiced that John " spoke for himself " on a certain occasion that Longfellow has made memorable. We were married on October 3, 1 876, in the beautiful Semi nary Chapel whose dedication had been hastened that the ceremony might take place there. The knot was tied by Pro fessor Egbert C. Smyth, before a large assembly of Andover citizens and students, and the next day we started on a brief tour to Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa, and Aylmer, my early home. A perusal of that charming idyl, " Their Wedding Journey," by William D. Howells, then recently published, whose characters took nearly the same honeymoon trip, will sufficiently describe the joys of that journey, which ended at Portland the day before my actual entrance upon the gospel ministry. Near the end of my senior year at Andover I had been called to the pastorate of the Williston Church of Portland, Maine, an offshoot from State Street Church, which held its services in a humble chapel on the corner of May and Dan- f orth Streets. Here a church of some fifty members had been gathered, together with a vigorous Sunday school. Among these fifty men and women were some of the rarest Christians I had ever known, — men and women who in spite of the few ness of their numbers and the scantiness of their resources would inevitably form the nucleus of a strong and vigorous church. Its story must be reserved for another chapter. Chapter VII Years 1876-18 83 WILLISTON DAYS A YOUNG PASTOR S FIRST CHURCH WILLISTON THE « THE RAPID GROWTH OF » BEAUTIFUL CITY BY THE SEA MAINE'S GREAT MEN ¦ THOMAS B. REED. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF I T7 Tr I OW much a young minister's first pastorate has to do with his future success or failure! He may be discouraged, disheartened, made almost disgusted with the ministry by an unresponsive, captious, or quarrelsome people; or the opposite kind of a church may lead him to feel that there is no profession; so exalted and so well worth while as the gospel ministry. It is the fashion of many modern novelists to depict the former kind of church, rare, and by no means typical, as it is, and to give the im pression that all the good people are outside of the church, and all the mean people within its communion. Williston Church was emphatically of the right sort. It was only four years old when I became its pastor, and had all the enthusiasm, buoyancy, and hopefulness of youth. Its membership of about fifty was largely composed of young men and women who desired in this new church to find larger scope for their activities than they could easily find in the old, staid State Street Church, from which they had come. Moreover the church was in a new and growing part of the city, not far from the beautiful Western Promenade with its 67 68 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS view of the White Mountains in the distance, and Deering's Oaks, of which Longfellow wrote so lovingly, near by. Though largely composed of poor people or those in very moderate circumstances at the beginning, the loca tion of the church soon drew to its membership several of the wealthier class who were very soon able to make the church self-sustaining. This happy mingling of rich and poor, a commingling which had no trace of servility Williston Chapel Out of which grew Williston Church. on one side, or condescending patronage on the other, was another most happy element which made for the im mediate success of the church. Indeed, so rapidly did it grow in its membership, its congregations, and its Sunday school that some other churches began to look askance upon this new enterprise. " What has become of our cat? " a neighboring minister's wife is reported to have asked her husband concerning a stray feline. " I don't know," answered her spouse, " unless it WILLISTON DAYS 69 has gone over to Williston with the rest of the folks." The great majority of new members, however, were not drawn from other churches, but came into our church on confession of their faith, and, during the seven years of my pastorate, more than fifty on an average were received each year. Before I accepted the call I was convinced that the limit of growth had been nearly reached if we remained in the little wooden chapel on the corner of May and Danf orth Streets, a chapel which would hold perhaps two hundred people when crowded, and one of the conditions of my accepting the call was that, within a year, the church should make an effort to " move to a more eligible location and build a new edifice." This seemed indeed at first a " large order " for the fifty church members with their scanty resources, but, before the year was out, it seemed much more feasible, and, within less than two years a beautiful new brick church was erected and dedicated on the corner of Thomas and Carrell Streets in the most attractive and rapidly-growing section of the city of Portland. A ten thousand dollar debt when the church was completed looked colossal indeed, since we supposed that every one had strained himself to the utmost in building the church. But the very first Sunday of its occupancy the debt was fully sub scribed, and the church was dedicated entirely free from any encumbrance. One happy feature of this first Sunday in the new church was the presentation of nine babies, whose parents consecrated them to the Master's service, among them our own little daughter, Maude Williston Clark. I have often wondered at the generosity and considerate- ness of my parishioners. As I look over a few of the sermons of those older days I am amazed that they should have been received with such kindly appreciation. I imagine, however, that the earnestness and enthusiasm of a young preacher often makes up for defects in thought and style which would not be so easily condoned in an older man, and that this fresh and 70 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS eager enthusiasm largely accounts for the popularity of the young " theologue " in our pulpits. The prayer meetings of Williston Church were from the beginning famous for their numbers in proportion to the church membership, and for genuine vigor and spirituality, I have never known them to be surpassed. The Christian Endeavor society, which was formed in the fifth year of my pastorate, was a constant recruiting-ground not only for the young people's meeting, but for the mid-week meeting of the church. I have been told that during a recent interregnum of pastor ates, when, for a year, Williston Church was without an or dained leader, more than forty laymen were found who were ready to conduct the mid-week meeting, so that for almost a full year the meeting had a different leader each week. Portland well deserved, even more than its larger sister, Brooklyn, the name of " The City of Churches." In those days there were nine Congregational churches, three Baptist, three Methodist, two Episcopal, two Universalist, and two Unitarian churches, as well as two large Catholic churches. These, with various conventicles for the smaller sects, cer tainly furnished spiritual opportunities sufficient for a city of 30,000 people. In many ways Portland was an ideal city for home-makers. It was neither so large that one was lost in it and his influence unappreciable, nor so small as to be concerned only with pro vincial matters and neighborhood gossip. It was a country- city, combining the advantages of both city and country. In the late seventies it was introducing the telephone, which was just beginning to come into use, but it had not yet attained to electric lights, and the infrequent street cars were pulled by horses. In the winter wheels were exchanged for runners, and the snow, trodden down hard in the middle of the street, was heaped up on the sides so that persons on opposite side walks could scarcely see each other because of the snow ram parts "which divided them. WILLISTON CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, PORTLAND, ME. The church of the First Christian Endeavor Society formed February 2, 1881. The Parish House at the left has been added since, during the pastorate of Rev. Smith Baker, D.D. WILLISTON DAYS 73 Portland, and, indeed, the whole State of Maine was at that time famous for the influence of its leading citizens in nation wide affairs. William Pitt Fessenden, who loomed so large in national concerns during the Civil War, was living in re tirement in his beautiful colonial home on State Street. Neal Dqw's home on Congress Street was pointed out to all visitors, and the little old gentleman with his halo of white hair and beard, though well on toward the eighties, was still prominent in municipal and State affairs, and as fiery as ever in his denunciation of the saloon, and in his support of the pro hibition law which he had fathered so many years before. James G. Blaine was a name to conjure by. He lived in Augusta, but he was frequently in Portland on political and other business. Though I was never personally acquainted with him, I remember well his handsome face in which were set two of the most piercing black eyes that I ever saw; eyes that commanded attention as well as his melodious voice and persuasive utterance. More than any other man I have ever seen he cast the spell called " magnetism," for want of a . better name, over all who came within sound of his voice or reach of his eye. He was literally a " spell-binder," and his marvellous memory for names and for little details in the lives of the people he met, added to his remarkable personal and political influence. One of the deacons of the Williston Church was in the rail way mail service of the Post Office Department. As he was walking along Exchange Street one day, someone from behind put his arm over the deacon's shoulder and said in a cheery tone, "Hello, Jefferds, how is the P. O. D.? " Looking around he saw that it was none other than the Secretary of State of the United States, James G. Blaine, who thus familiarly addressed him, and it can be imagined that Deacon Jefferds voted for Blaine whenever he had opportunity, who ever might be the opposing candidates. Another prominent statesman just coming into power was 74 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Nelson Dingley of Lewiston, the Speaker of the House for many years, and author of the Dingley Tariff Bill. He was prominent in religious circles as well as in national politics, was occasionally seen at the annual meetings of the Congrega tional State Conference of which I was moderator during three years of my pastorate in Portland. Mr. Dingley was after wards moderator of the National Congregational Council. Of all the coterie of famous Maine statesmen who made that era so distinguished in the history of the State, and gave to the commonwealth more influence in national affairs than was accorded to a dozen other States combined, Thomas Brackett Reed had, in many respects, the most interesting and original personality of all of them. It so happened that I knew him better than any of the others, for his mother-in- law and brother-in-law were members of Williston Church, and for many years he was a summer neighbor at Grand Beach on the shores of Casco Bay. My wife and I were his guests in Washington before he became Speaker of the House, but not before his ready repartee and caustic wit had made him a power to be reckoned with by both parties. But it was at the seashore that I knew him best. His great bulk could have been seen any early morning, rolling, sailor fashion, along the boardwalk, usually followed by my dog Duke, who seemed to be as fond of him as were his human neighbors. Mr. Reed and I were both trying to learn to ride the bicycle at the same time, an art in which neither of us became proficient. He succeeded better, however, in amateur photography, and took several pictures of my dog and his master. In one of these I was seen riding towards Old Or chard in a wobbly fashion, while the picture, owing to some defect in development, was light-struck immediately over my head. In sending me the picture afterwards from Wash ington, he wrote that if he were not afraid of being irreverent he should label this picture " Paul on the Way to Damascus." He had a large store of Bible quotations ready to his hands WILLISTON DAYS 75 as his speeches proved, and was much exercised over theo logical questions. Indeed, during his early years he had intended to study for the ministry, and was partially supported in his college course by State Street Church on that account. His views. having changed while in college, however, he de cided to study law and honorably paid back to the church all that it had advanced for his education. His political op ponents garbled these facts in various circulars and pamphlets when he first ran for Congress, branding him as a dishonorable religious renegade, a misrepresentation which I was able to refute in one or two religious papers of influence. But when I casually mentioned that his father-in-law had been an honored Congregational minister, the harmless item of in formation acted as a boomerang, for the Democrats at once charged him with trying to " ride into Congress on the backs of his wife's relatives." Years afterwards, on my return from one of my visits to India, he had a serious talk with me about the mysterious ways of Providence which he could not understand, and which allowed millions of harmless natives to die in the awful famine which was then raging in India. The last conversation with him that I remember related to the Filipinos. It was after his retirement from Congress, prompted largely by his disagreement with the McKinley ad ministration on the Philippine question. Naturally he was not fond of "the little Major" as he called McKinley, who had snatched from him the presidential nomination when it was almost within his grasp, and he totally disagreed with him in regard to the retention of the Philippines. With the charac teristic drawl, which marked every utterance in public or pri vate, he said, in answer to the suggestion that it was our op portunity to enter the Philippines and convert and civilize the natives, " I don't think it's the business of Uncle Sam to set up a kindergarten for the Filipinos, or to be their wet nurse." In those days there were no particularly famous literary 76 MEMORIES- OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS men in Portland though J. M. Neale, the story writer and essayist, was living when I first went there, and Portland was particularly proud to have been the birthplace of Longfellow. The house in which he was actually born had become a poor and dirty Irish tenement, now redeemed, I am glad to know, and to be preserved for the loving reverence of future genera tions. Portland will never forget that she has been im mortalized in more than one of Longfellow's poems, as he wrote of the " beautiful town that is seated by the sea," of " Deering's Oaks," of the " black wharves " where lay the ships from distant lands, and the swarthy sailors who manned them. Every line of " My Lost Youth " is full of memories of Portland. I can quote but two verses: " Often I think of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still: ' A boy's will is the wind's will., And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' " I can see the shadowy lines of its trees, And catch, in sudden gleams, The sheen of the far-surrounding seas, And islands that were the Hesperides Of all my boyish dreams. And the burden of that old song, It murmurs and whispers still: ' A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' " Chapter VIII Year 1881 THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR MOVEMENT FEBRUARY 2, I 88 I PRE-CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR SOCIETIES COOKIES AND A CONSTITUTION A WONDERFUL TRANS FORMATION GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOP THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY DENOMINATIONAL OPPOSITION. I HE most important incident of my life in Portland, though it seemed of small conse quence at the time, was the formation of the first society of Christian Endeavor. This took place on February 2, 1881 in the par lor of my home at 62 Neal Street, where I The society was an evolution, rather than a For more than four years, was then living. creation by the fiat of the minister. as was natural in such a church, my thoughts and prayers had centred around the development of the young people. Every year there had been seasons of special religious interest among them in connection with the " Week of Prayer," in the early days of January, which we religiously observed; a week which, I regret to say, has largely lost its significance in most churches. During the four months previous to the Week of Prayer, after the re-gathering of the church when the summer vaca tion was over, my aim was to make my preaching and pastoral work lead up to that week, as the culminating season in the 77 78 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS church year. Then special meetings were held every night, the claims of Christ for an immediate decision to serve Him were urged, an opportunity was given for all to declare them selves, and without exception, each year a religious awaken ing was the result, which usually brought from twenty to forty new members, most of them young people, into the church. But I had increasingly felt each year that it was not enough to lead them to declare themselves upon Christ's side, and then to join the church. Though in the " Pastor's Class " I had tried faithfully to prepare them for church membership, I still felt that much was left to be desired. The young Christians, naturally diffident in the presence of their elders, took little or no part in the prayer meetings of the church, when there were others who could speak and pray so much more fluently; nor were they prominent in its social and be nevolent activities, when overshadowed by others of more ex perience. The great task which confronted Williston Church, as it has confronted so many others, was how to give these young converts duties and responsibilities, suited to their powers, that would train and develop them for larger duties and re sponsibilities. Even before this Williston Church had not been especially lacking in resourcefulness in its efforts for the young. We had tried the debating club, and the musical society, and attractive social gatherings had been frequent. The minister's wife had been particularly active in her efforts to interest the boys and girls in missionary lore, and to in crease their interest and their contributions for the missionary societies, and her " Mizpah Circle " of boys and girls had be come one of the most important features of the church life. Still none of these efforts seemed to accomplish the desired result of training up a company of devoted, earnest young people, outspoken among their companions in their acknowl edgement of Christ's claim and ready to work for Him along all practical and systematic lines. BEGINNING OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR 79 All such efforts as I have described for training in- debate, in singing, in temperance, and missionary zeal failed, not be cause they were not good in themselves, but because they did not go far enough in developing an all-round, symmetrical Christian character. Because of this defect there have been a multitude of failures in young people's societies of various names since that day, and I doubt very much whether regalia The Mizpah Mission Circle Of Williston Church, of which Mrs. Clark was superintendent. This Circle was merged into the first Christian Endeavor society when it was formed. This picture was taken on the steps of Dr. Clark's first home in Portland, at 42 Pine Street. and passwords and secret formulas which the rest of the church are not supposed to know, or even a khaki uniform, would have developed these young Christians of Portland into stal wart champions of the church which most of them became. This is not saying that I am not heartily in favor of the Boy Scouts and similar organizations, but something more is needed in a church for training young Christians. 8o MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS The second of February, 1881, was a clear, cold day, typical of a Maine winter, and the pastor's wife had invited the boys and girls of the Mizpah Circle to the parsonage on Neal Street for the afternoon, providing for them, besides the usual missionary meeting, plenty of games and a supper, of which an abundance of home-made cookies was an out-standing feature. After supper the younger children went home, Williston Parsonage in 1881 Parsonage of Williston Church, Portland, Me. The first Christian Endeavor society was formed in the left-hand front corner room of the lower floor, and there the constitution was signed. The upper left-hand corner front room was the pastor's study, where the constitution was written earlier in the same day, Feb ruary 2, 1881. while the older ones were joined later in the evening by their still older brothers and sisters, until a company of fifty-eight had gathered in the parsonage parlor. While the minister's wife had been making cookies in the kitchen, the minister, in his study in the third story, had been framing a constitution for the Young People's society which he hoped to form that evening, and which he decided to call the BEGINNING OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR 8 1 "Williston Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor." This society was different from others that he had started, chiefly because it laid the greatest stress on the religious features. It was to be an out-and-out Christian society. The pastor had become tired of half-way measures for training his young people, and while he doubted the efficacy of the new plans, he decided that they were well worth trying. On this account the activities of the new society were to centre around the weekly young people's prayer meeting, though of course they were not to end there. In order to make this meeting a real power each member was to promise to attend and take some part in it, not to preach a little sermon by any means, or to deliver a Pauline exhortation, or to offer a prayer as long as Solomon's. A Bible verse, if it expressed his thought, was to answer the requirement of " taking some part aside from singing," and a sentence of prayer, which might also be one of the thousand Bible prayers, would fulfil all requirements. There was naturally some hesitation about accepting these stringent rules, but, led by the teacher of the Young Men's Bible Class, Mr. W. H. Pennell, all the young people present signed the new constitution, after it had been carefully ex plained, and the first society of Christian Endeavor was launched with Mr. Granville Staples as its first president. It made no stir, however, even in Williston Church circles. Nothing was said about it in the morning papers, and probably half the church members knew nothing about it, for this church had a fashion which might be commended to others, of letting their pastor, whom they trusted, do about what he thought best without criticism, but with much encouragement if the plan worked out well. The immediate transformation of the young people's prayer meeting, which in Williston and in many other churches had been for years a dead-and-alive affair, was as surprising as it was gratifying. The new members did as they had promised. 82 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS Instead of a few of the older, gray-haired " young people " (young people by courtesy) monopolizing all the time, the forty or fifty members of the new society all took their part. The pastor had only to sit back and enjoy the meeting as a grateful and blessed surprise, summing up at the end, perhaps, the chief lessons that had been brought out. The committees that had been provided for in the constitu tion at once organized for service; the lookout committee to V m 11 "% ' ^ :--^.^p Mr. Granville Staples First President of the first society. Still in active_business in Portland, Me. secure new members and to make sure that they knew what they were doing when they joined the society; the prayer- meeting committee to provide topics and leaders for each meet ing, and to see that it was the best possible meeting that they could arrange for; the social committee to make the young people thoroughly acquainted with one another, and the music committee to turn the musical abilities of the society to the best account. Several other committees were soon formed. BEGINNING OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR 83 I shall not go into particulars or relate here the history of the Christian Endeavor movement, since that has already been written in more than one large volume. I need only add that the society was an increasing joy to the pastor, and an ever- increasing strength to the church, and that, though half a dozen generations of young people have since come and gone, the activities of the Williston society have never been inter rupted. It is now especially prosperous under the guidance of its popular pastor, Dr. Turk. If the new society was at first little known in the church and community of Portland it can well be imagined that it was utterly unknown for months in the wider church circles out side of the city. Articles, however, written by the pastor for The Congregationalist and The Sunday School Times in the following summer, telling how one church sought to train its young people, attracted considerable attention, and were copied in several religious papers in America and Great Britain. As a result the second society was started in the North Church of Newburyport, Mass., in October, 1881, by the enterprising young pastor, Rev. Charles Perry Mills, who, by the way, was an inveterate punster. He fastened upon me in these early days, as a pure piece of f acetiousness, the soubriquet " Father Endeavor," for which he pretended my initials stood. This joke was taken in earnest by people all over the country and has led many whom I had never seen, to suppose, for many years past, that I am only slightly under a hundred years of age. Before the end of 1881 two or three more societies of Christian Endeavor were formed, and during the next five years they multiplied, slowly at first, but with increasing momentum, until at last thousands in all Protestant denomina tions, were formed every year. It is needless to say that this surprising development of the first little society has been as amazing to me as it could pos sibly be to any one else. No such design or dream was at 84 MEMORIES OF MANY MEN IN MANY LANDS first entertained, and the growth of the movement has always been a source of genuine humility to me as I have thought how little I have had to do with it, and how purely Providential the work has been, from its insignificant beginning to its present development throughout the world. While I feel profoundly how little credit I deserve for this growth, I have been deeply grateful for the testimony that has come literally from thousands of pastors, mission aries, and lay workers that their first impulse to give them selves to religious service, and the first realization that they could actually speak and pray and work for Christ came to them in a Christian Endeavor prayer meeting, or when ap pointed on a Christian Endeavor committee. At the same time many amusing incidents concerning my own life and my family history, of which I was totally un aware, have come to me from many sources. Several persons whom I have never met have written me that they knew me well as a boy. At least a score of people have told me that they have heard me preach in some place that I have never visited, or that I was pastor of some church of which I had never heard. Several scores have informed me that they had Christian Endeavor societies long before 1881. To be sure they were not called " Christian Endeavor," nor did they have the distinctive features or constitution of the society, but then " they were practically Christian Endeavor societies." The printed report of an ecclesiastical conference of a de nomination other than my own even gave a circumstantial ac count of how I had said at a public meeting, " Gentlemen and ladies, I am not the founder of the soqiety of Christian Endeavor. That honor belongs to one of your own ministers, Rev. - — to whom I am glad to make this acknowl edgment even at this late day." Since, as a matter of fact, I had never spoken at the meeting referred to, and had never heard of the good brother alluded to, I have often wondered at the vivid imagination of the scribe who made up this report. BEGINNING OF CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR 85 As a matter of fact the rapid growth of the society is not to be wondered at, for tens of thousands of pastors were think ing along the same lines and desiring the same results, and were eager to adopt any plan that promised well, without any itching desire for originality or notoriety. i?Ax~y<-rr^i, £n*6*wv-r-, I Tbrttt^ff ,7t<£ •) -*-<^uyo t£*^&wi<*- y jfe/-, ft~u™£ci^6^.7-^-y*4~~y*^, y*£^< /r^fy. ~&*a£ fc»wy «ye y*<~~r -f^- O- Jr