In the following year my father continued to do a great deal of public speaking. His home troubles were growing greater, and his business life in the city was daily becoming more difficult, but this seemed only to make him toil the harder in that cause of religious and political progress which lay so near his heart. At the new Hall of Science, 142 Old Street, which had just been leased in the interests of the Freethought party, Mr Bradlaugh delivered in the year upwards of forty lectures, for none of which he received a single penny, devoting the whole of the proceeds towards paying the debt upon the building. He did not allow any one month to pass without giving one or more Sundays to the New Hall. He lectured several times also at the hall in Cleveland Street; and in the latter part of the year, for the most part, he visited thirty or more provincial towns, at many of which he gave three discourses on the Sunday. In 1869 also Mr Bradlaugh took part in an examination into alleged spiritualistic phenomena held by the London Dialectical Society, but without any satisfactory results. Undoubtedly the chief event of the year for him was his final defeat of the Government in their prosecution of the _National Reformer_, and through this the repeal of the odious Security laws. He was involved in another law-suit, which, as we shall see later, led to the amending of the laws relating to evidence. Matters went rather more smoothly with my father's provincial lecturing this year; no town seemed to be sufficiently encouraged by the course of affairs in Devonport and Huddersfield to follow their example very closely. But still he met with some rebuff. For instance, when he was at Blyth on April 3rd, the innkeepers there were all so pious that none would give him food or shelter. April 3rd was a Saturday, not a Sunday, so there was not even the lame excuse of keeping the Sabbath Day holy by refusing to harbour an Atheist. The people of Blyth who undertook to provide for the creature comforts of the inhabitants and visitors must have been bigoted to the last degree, for in the week before Mr Bradlaugh's visit, a coffee-house keeper had refused to supply with tea some persons who were rash enough to admit that they had attended Mrs Law's lectures. Happily, such churlish bigotry was by no means universal, for the Blyth Lecture Hall was so crowded when Mr Bradlaugh arrived that he had to gain admittance through a back window. He afterwards related how "one hearty fellow and two or three Unitarians volunteered to give me a night's shelter, but I was unaware of this until I had made my arrangements for a midnight walk in the dark to Bedlington under escort of half a dozen stalwart fellows." This is the occasion to which Mr Thomas Burt referred in his article in the _Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review_ for July 1891. Mr Burt there says that all the ordinary halls and schoolrooms were refused to Mr Bradlaugh, but that a gentleman, Mr Richard Fynes, who