[Illustration: There was a scurrying to the garden pump.]
The parson lived in the village, some five miles distant. He preached every Sunday morning and evening in the village church to a congregation of perhaps fifty souls, and received from them a salary of five hundred dollars a year. Once in two weeks he drove out to our school-house on the Sunday afternoon to preach to the farmers and their families, who did not attend the village church because they considered it a cruelty to horses that had worked all the week to be obliged to carry the family to church on Sunday. We in our district added one hundred dollars "and a donation party" to the minister's salary. The inhabitants of another farming district, six miles on the other side of the village, rewarded the parson in the same way for preaching to them on the alternate Sundays when he did not come to us; so the minister had, all told, seven hundred dollars a year (£140), _and_ two "donation parties"--not a large sum on which to support a family of five, yet considerably more than Goldsmith's village preacher, who was "passing rich on forty pounds a year."
Four times a year the minister visited all his country parishioners. It generally took him two or three days to go the rounds in one neighbourhood--a neighbourhood, I may say, extended over several miles. He would leave "town" (there were six hundred inhabitants in the place where he presided over the only steepled meeting-house of his three charges!) early in the morning, and reach the first house where he was to call at about ten o'clock. At noon he would have his dinner with some one of the farmer folk, being careful to select for his noon call a family with whom he had not partaken bread on his previous visit of three or six months back; for to have the parson to dinner or supper or to "put him up for the night" was an honour for which there was great rivalry, and he tried to be impartial in his distribution of such favours. During the meal hours, the minister's horse fared as sumptuously as did his good master. Apples and sugar and turnips and carrots and all the luxuries that the farm produced were given to the animal by the children of the place, while the farmer or his hired help brought out their choicest corn and bran and oats and fragrant hay. Nothing was too good for the minister and his horse. Indeed, even the "buggy" would be washed up and made "fit" during the interval of the meal hour.