wenty guineas; and 1,000 pounds was
raised, and competent agents sent out. It proved by no means an easy
matter to obtain these lecturers, for their duty was not confined to
lecturing; they had also to revive drooping anti-slavery societies and to
establish new ones. Also they were to have collections at the end of
every lecture. One of them who came to Wrentham was Captain Pilkington.
'Pilkington,' writes Sir George Stephen, 'was a pleasing lecturer, and
won over many by his amiable manners; but he wanted power, and resigned
in six months.' We in Wrentham, however, did not think so, and I can to
this day recall the sensation he created in our rustic minds as he
described the horrors of slavery, and showed us the whip and chains by
which those horrors were caused. To the Dissenting chapel most of these
lecturers were indebted for their audience, and if I ever worked hard as
a boy, it was to get signatures to anti-slavery petitions. Naturally, a
Church parson came to regard all that was attacked by Reformers as a
bulwark of the Establishment, and in our part the Meetingers' were the
sole friends of the slave.

As was to be expected, the reading of the village was of the most limited
description. It is true we children jumped for joy as once a month came
the carrier's cart from Beccles, with the books for the club--the
_Evangelical Magazine_, for all the principal families of the
congregation, and the _Penny Magazine_ and _Chambers's Journal_--then but
in their infancy--for ourselves; but, apart from that, there was no
reading worth mentioning. That which most astonishes the tourist in
Ireland is the way in which people read the newspapers. In our Suffolk
village the very reverse was the case, partly because there were few
newspapers to read, partly because there were few to read them, and
partly because they were dear to buy. The one paper which we took in was
the _Suffolk Chronicle_, which made its appearance on Saturday morning,
the price of which was sixpence, and which was edited by a sturdy Radical
of the name of King, who to the last held to the belief that to have a
London letter full of literary or critical talk for the Suffolk farmers
was, not to put too fine a point on it, to throw pearls before swine.
And perhaps he was right. I can well remember, when one of my early
poetical contributions appeared in its columns, how a fear was expressed
to me by a farmer's widow in our parish, lest 'it had cost me