FREEDOM

I have often wondered what conjunction of the stars caused me to
become a schoolmaster, if, indeed, the stars, lucky or otherwise, had
anything to do with it. It may have been the salary that lured me,
for thirty-five dollars a month bulks large on a boy's horizon.
Possibly the fact that in those days there was no anteroom to the
teaching business may have been the deciding factor. One had but to
exchange his hickory shirt for a white one, and the trick was done.
There was not even a fence between the corn-field and the
schoolhouse. I might just as easily have been a preacher but for the
barrier in the shape of a theological seminary, or a hod-carrier but
for the barrier of learning how. As it was, I could draw my pay for
husking corn on Saturday night, and begin accumulating salary as a
schoolmaster on Monday. The plan was simplicity itself, and that may
account for my choice of a vocation.

I have sometimes tried to imagine myself a preacher, but with poor
success. The sermon would bother me no little, to make no mention of
the other functions. I think I never could get through with a
marriage ceremony, and at a christening I'd be on nettles all the
while, fearing the baby would cry and thus disturb the solemnity of
the occasion and of the preacher. I'd want to take the baby into my
own arms and have a romp with him--and so would forget about the
baptizing. In casting about for a possible text for this impossible
preacher, I have found only one that I think I might do something
with. Hence, my preaching would endure but a single week, and even
at that we'd have to have a song service on Sunday evening in lieu of
a sermon.