But the chief interest centred in the travelling preacher, especially if he were a stranger who had not been there before. Would he preach the Word, or would he be one of those who rambled on for an hour or more, yet said nothing? Most of these men, who gave up their Sunday rest and walked miles to preach at the village meeting houses, were farm labourers or small shopkeepers. With a very few exceptions they were poor, uneducated men. “The blind leading the blind,” Laura’s father said of them. They may have been unenlightened in some respects, but some of them had gifts no education could have given. There was something fine about their discourses, as they raised their voices in rustic eloquence and testified to the cleansing power of “the Blood,” forgetting themselves and their own imperfections of speech in their ardour.

Others were less sincere, and some merely self-seeking poseurs who took to preaching as the only means of getting a little limelight shed on their undistinguished lives. One such was a young shop assistant from the market town, who came, stylishly dressed, with a bunch of violets in his buttonhole, smoothing his well-oiled hair with his hand and shaking clouds of scent from his large white handkerchief. He emphatically did not preach the Word. His perfume and buttonhole and pseudo-cultured accent so worked upon the brethren that, after he had gone, they for once forgot their rule of no criticism and exclaimed: “Did you ever see such a la-de-da in all your draggings-up?”

Then there was the elderly man who chose for his text: “I will sweep them off the face of the earth with the besom of destruction,” and proceeded to take each word of his text as a heading. “I will sweep them off the face of the earth. I will sweep them off the face of the earth. I will sweep them off the face of the earth,” and so on. By the time he had finished he had expounded the nature of God and justified His ways to man to his own satisfaction; but he made such a sad mess of it that the children’s ears burned with shame for him.

Some managed to be sincere Christians and yet quicker of wit and lighter of hand. The host keeping the door one night was greeted by the arriving minister with “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,” and capped it with “than dwell in the tents of the ungodly.”

Methodism, as known and practised there, was a poor people’s religion, simple and crude; but its adherents brought to it more fervour than was shown by the church congregation, and appeared to obtain more comfort and support from it than the church could give. Their lives were exemplary.