Mother Gander—so everybody called Jeff Gander’s buxom spouse—had fought like a lioness to save him. “Not a doctor for miles around,” as the paralysed old Bundock put it triumphantly from his bed-of-all-news, “but she carted him over, and set ’em all consulting and quarrelling. There was two from London, one of ’em a bart, and all wasted. Charlie the potboy, as he was then, feelingly told my boy, the postman, that he could ha’ set up a public-house with the fees. Not that I approve o’ public-houses, but leastways they give you more waluable drinks than doctors does. And when poor Jeff was gone, and Mother Gander was carrying on like crazy, comes the Parson and tells her ’tis the Lord’s will. “‘Then if it’s the Lord’s will,’ says she, like lightning, for she was always quick in the uptake, ‘why do you run down the Peculiars as just begs the Lord to alter His will, instead o’ throwing their hard-earned gold to the doctors?’ That was the way her eyes opened to the Truth, and she learnt how to save her soul as well as her money.” The Peculiars, they often lamented, were “not strong enough” in Chipstone: they looked yearningly “over the water”—to Rochford where the great Banyard himself was prophesying; or to Woodham where no less than five hundred Brethren and Sisters fevered themselves in a hall too small for the throngs that sought admission. But their own meetings, though, if we may trust Caleb, “noice things were brought out,” were numerically disheartening. The capture of “The Black Sheep”—a hostelry to which all social roads radiated—was thus an event of considerable importance.