Old Ebenezer

Excerpt

CHAPTER I.

Sam Lyman.

In more than one of the sleepy neighborhoods that lay about the drowsy town of Old Ebenezer, Sam Lyman had lolled and dreamed. He had come out of the keen air of Vermont, and for a time he was looked upon as a marvel of energy, but the soft atmosphere of a southwestern state soothed the Yankee worry out of his walk, and made him content to sit in the shade, to wait for the other man to come; and, as the other man was doing the same thing, rude hurry was not a feature of any business transaction. Of course the smoothing of Lyman's Yankee ruffles had taken some time. He had served as cross-tie purchaser for a new railway, had kept books and split slabs for kindling wood at a saw mill; then, as an assistant to the proprietor of a cross-roads store, he had counted eggs and bargained for chickens, with a smile for a gingham miss and a word of religious philosophy for the dame in home-spun. But he was now less active, and already he had begun to long for easier employment; so he "took up" school at forty dollars a month. In the Ebenezer country, the school teacher is regarded as a supremely wise and hopelessly lazy mortal. He is expected to know all of earth, as the preacher is believed to know all of heaven, and when he has once been installed into this position, a disposition to get out of it is branded as a sacrilege. He has taken the pedagogic veil and must wear it. But Lyman was not satisfied with the respect given to this calling; he longed for something else, not of a more active nature, it is true, but something that might embrace a broader swing. The soft atmosphere had turned the edge of his physical energy, but his mind was eager and grasping. His history was that dear fallacy, that silken toga which many of us have wrapped about ourselves—the belief that a good score at college means immediate success out in the world. And he had worked desperately to finish his education, had taken care of horses and waited upon table at a summer resort in the White Mountains. His first great and cynical shock was to find that his "accomplishment" certificate was one of an enormous edition; that it meant comparatively nothing in the great brutal world of trade; that modesty was a drawback, and that gentleness was as weak as timidity. And repeated failures drove him from New England to a community where, it had been said, the people were less sharp, less cold, and far less exacting. He was getting along in years when he took up the school—past thirty-five. He was tall, lean, and inclined toward angularity. He had never been handsome, but about his honest face there was something so manly, so wholesome, so engaging, that it took but one touch of sentiment to light it almost to fascinating attractiveness. Children, oftener than grown persons, were struck with his kindly eyes; and his voice had been compared with church music, so deep and so sacred in tone; and yet it was full of a whimsical humor, for the eyes splashed warm mischief and the mouth was a silent, half sad laugh....