came, and his wife joined the gleaners in the field, she was driven out with the taunt, "What! wives of the clergy go agleaning?"
His master, too, finding that some of the men began to refuse to work on Sunday, thought it was high time to get rid of him. So he had to leave Ewell, and went to Thames Ditton, where he got a situation as a coal-heaver at ten shillings a week. Here he commenced to preach, and soon found himself opposed far more roughly than he had been at Ewell. Persecution by the State had longed ceased, but persecution by the mob was what every unauthorized preacher had to expect.
Many efforts were made to destroy his little meeting. One anecdote he relates in his "Naked Bow of God" will serve to show the sort of persecution the mob were not only permitted, but encouraged to carry out against those whom they called Methodistical preachers. A woman who had a kitchen frequented by bargemen adjoining the room he used to preach in, having done her best to disturb the congregation, determined to lay a plot to turn them into the aggressors. She entered the meeting, struck one of the women, and then, some rising to turn her out, she cried Murder, whereupon the mob smashed the doors to pieces and attacked the meeting by burning asafœtida, and throwing dirt over those present. After breaking up the seats, the wretched crew smashed an entire window. The place being licensed, a warrant was procured, and some of the aggressors taken before the magistrates, but to little purpose, for it soon appeared with whose side these worthy guardians of law and order sympathized.
So the mob, meeting with such encouragement, adorned their hats with blue ribbons, and followed their victims home, the whole parish joining in the triumph; the bells being immediately rung, and Huntington's little cottage beset on all sides. His effigy was then burnt, and a blasphemous harangue delivered by way of a funeral sermon.
On another occasion a man, hoping to disturb the meeting, came into the room dressed in a woman's bonnet, petticoat, and black oilskin cloak, his face smeared with tallow and coloured with soot. Such practical jokes were not, however, so dangerous
