He is a tall, heavy man, perhaps fifty years of age, with a mass of
hair upon his head but none upon his face, except where thick eyebrows
hang like brushwood over the twin caverns of his eyes. As he speaks he
raises his right hand and holds the palm towards you, moving it slowly
to and fro for emphasis, and he measures his words as he goes along.

He was describing his experiences in a new chapel where he had recently
preached, a gothic building, "more like a church, as it were, than a
chapel."

"Ah yes, Mrs. Hubbard," he said (he never addressed me direct, perhaps
because he suspected that I was not one of the confraternity), "I
always mistrust a chapel with a spire to it; and the spirit of
Methodism, as it were, cannot dwell in transepts or chancels. There is
not the heartiness, not the freedom, which we associate with our
chapels. The air is heavy, as it were, with the spirit of
sacerdotalism. Why, ma'am, at this particular chapel--church, they
call it--they had choir stalls, filled with men and boys, and a
liturgical service, as it were. Ah yes! No sound of 'Hallelujah!' or
'Praise the Lord!' escaped the lips of the devout worshipper. They
were stifled stillborn, as it were. It was cold, ma'am, cold and
formal; John Wesley would never have found his heart strangely warmed
in such an atmosphere. No!

"And yet, ma'am, there was something in the arrangements that stirred
my feelings, as it were. Here, on my right hand, were grouped the
scholars; children in the springtime of life, as it were. Yes! it was
a moving sight, ma'am, to a man of feeling." (I wickedly thought of
his hands.) "Life was before them--spread out like a map, as it were,
with nothing but the outline; or like a copy-book which would be soiled
and disfigured with many blots, as it were, before the end was reached.
Yes!

"And on my left were the elders of the flock, gathered there, I was
told, because the acoustic properties, as it were, are excellent in the
transepts: the grey-headed sires, who had almost fought through the
battle and were now awaiting the recall, as it were. Men and women in
the late evening of life, as it were, who would soon pass behind the
sunset.

"And in front of me were the middle-aged, those who were bearing the
burden and heat of the day, as it were. Yes! labourers in life's
vineyard; earning their bread in the sweat of their brow, going forth
to their work until the evening, as it were.

"Yes! And