The church mouse did not achieve his legendary reputation for leanness from mere accident. He was no doubt the inhabitant of a country church in the days of our grandfathers when he sometimes ran a poor second to the minister.
The underpaid, and often unpaid, ministers to the souls of our rural forefathers were often reduced to a polite form of begging and few of their families rose above genteel undernourishment. Their parishioners had no illusion about how much food and clothing the eighty or a hundred dollars a year, an average salary, would buy. The customary supplement to this starvation wage was the church social, given as a benefit for the preacher and his family.
Church socials were held on the lawn of the church on summer evenings. Members of the church donated cake, platters of fried chicken, canned preserves, fruit, and other delicacies of the season which were served at plank tables laid on wooden sawhorses. Food was served family style and the usual cost of a church social meal was twenty-five cents for all you could eat. Ten cents was charged for children, who usually ate twice as much as their elders. Society leaders of the community presided at the cake table, where the work was easy and where they got a chance to compare the baking skill of their neighbors. The preacher's wife and the lesser members of the congregation washed dishes and served the hot food from a brick stove or kerosene range set up for the evening under a canvas. It was a gala time for the children of the community, who could play on this rare occasion when neither Sunday school nor public school cast a shadow on their spirits.
The swain who squired a girl at a church social dinner was a marked man, for this was understood by all as an open and public declaration of serious intentions. There was no trifling with tradition.
The minister's family was richer by twenty-five or thirty dollars, everybody had a good time, and every housewife gathered up enough leftovers to feed her family the next day, a phenomenon of the fish and loaves sort that was very mysterious and wonderful.
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