f
supposititious little boys who were secretly watching me from
afar, and whose whole career, in time and in eternity, might be
disastrously affected if I did not keep my lamp burning.

The year which followed upon my baptism did not open very happily
at the Room. Considerable changes had now taken place in the
community. My Father's impressive services, a certain prestige in
his preaching, the mere fact that so vigorous a person was at the
head of affairs, had induced a large increase in the attendance.
By this time, if my memory does not fail me as to dates, we had
left the dismal loft over the stables, and had built ourselves a
perfectly plain, but commodious and well-arranged chapel in the
centre of the village. This greatly added to the prosperity of
the meeting. Everything had combined to make our services
popular, and had attracted to us a new element of younger people.
Numbers of youthful masons and carpenters, shop-girls and
domestic servants, found the Room a pleasant trysting-place, and
were more or less superficially induced to accept salvation as it
was offered to them in my Father's searching addresses. My Father
was very shrewd in dealing with mere curiosity or idle motive,
and sharply packed off any youths who simply came to make eyes at
the girls, or any 'maids' whose only object was to display their
new bonnet-strings. But he was powerless against a temporary
sincerity, the simulacrum of a true change of heart. I have often
heard him say,--of some young fellow who had attended our
services with fervour for a little while, and then had turned
cold and left us,--'and I thought that the Holy Ghost had wrought
in him!' Such disappointments grievously depress an evangelist.

Religious bodies are liable to strange and unaccountable
fluctuations. At the beginning of the third year since our
arrival, the congregation seemed to be in a very prosperous
state, as regards attendance, conversions and other outward signs
of activity. Yet it was quite soon after this that my Father
began to be harassed by all sorts of troubles, and the spring of
1860 was a critical moment in the history of the community.
Although he loved to take a very high tone about the Saints, and
involved them sometimes in a cloud of laudatory metaphysics, the
truth was that they were nothing more than peasants of a somewhat
primitive type, not well instructed in the rules of conduct and
liable to exactly the same weaknesses as invade the ru