ere sermons in the good, old-fashioned
sense of the term. His poems were the despair of the critics, but won
him a wide reputation. He was an adept in what Whistler called the
gentle art of making enemies. Though more familiar with the inside of a
pulpit, he was not unacquainted with the inside of a jail. He raised his
numerous progeny on an income seldom exceeding one thousand dollars a
year. And, what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in a career replete
with surprises, he was the hero of one of the best authenticated ghost
stories on record.

This visitation from the supermundane came as a climax to a series of
worldly annoyances that would have upset the equanimity of a very
Job--and the Rev. Samuel, in temper at any rate, was the reverse of
Job-like. His troubles began in the closing years of the seventeenth
century, when he became rector of the established church at Epworth,
Lincolnshire, a venerable edifice dating back to the stormy days of
Edward II., and as damp as it was old. The story goes that this living
was granted him as a reward because he dedicated one of his poems to
Queen Mary. But the Queen would seem to have had punishment in mind for
him, rather than reward.

Located in the Isle of Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen
country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water,
Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits
must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family
and his few household belongings toiled through quagmire and morass;
they must have fallen still farther when he gazed down the one
straggling street at the rectory of mud and thatch that was to be his
home; and they must have touched the zero mark, zealous High Churchman
that he was, with the discovery that his peasant parishioners were
Presbyterian-minded folk who hated ritualism as cordially as they hated
the Pope.

Whatever his secret sentiments, he lost no time in endeavoring to stamp
the imprint of his vigorous personality on Epworth. Forgetful, or
unheedful, of the fact that the natives of the Isle of Axholme were
notoriously violent and lawless, he began to rule them with a rod of
iron. Thus they should think, thus they should do, thus they should go!
Above all, the Rev. Samuel never permitted them to forget that in
addition to spiritual they owed him temporal obligations. In the matter
of tithes--always a sore subject in a community hard put to extract a