The visit of "one of Mr. Wesley's preachers" led to the conversion of the two sons of Lackington's employer, and set the young apprentice on a train of thought and inquiry which eventually led him also to cast in his lot with the Methodists. He was then about sixteen years of age, and had so little knowledge of reading that he gladly paid the three halfpence per week which his mother allowed him as pocket-money to one of the young Bowdens for instruction. Yet he had at this time no literary taste, and no thought beyond the limited round of devotional reading, which consisted chiefly of the Bible, and the tracts, sermons, and hymns of the Wesleys. His desire to hear the Methodist preachers was so great at this time, that one Sunday morning, when his mistress had locked the door to prevent his going out for this purpose, he jumped out of the bedroom window, fondly imagining that the words of the ninety-first Psalm, the eleventh and twelfth verses, which he had just been reading, would be sufficient guarantee of his safety in perpetrating such an act of rashness and folly. The last three years of his apprenticeship were spent in the service of his master's widow, Mr. Bowden having died when Lackington had served about four years. When he was just twenty-one, and about six months before the expiration of his time, a severe contest for the representation of Taunton in Parliament took place, and the friends of two of the candidates purchased his freedom from Mrs. Bowden's service in order to secure both his vote and his services. The scenes of excitement and dissipation into which he was thrown at this time unsettled his mind, and for a time entirely ruined his religious character. The election over, he went to live at Bristol, and lodged in a street called Castle Ditch, with a young man named John Jones, a maker of stuff shoes, who led him into dissipation. Jones, however, had been pretty well educated, and managed to awaken in Lackington's mind a desire for more knowledge than he then possessed. He was, indeed, wofully ignorant, had no idea of writing, and when he began to feel a thirst for general reading, confesses that he dared not enter a bookseller's shop because he did not know the name of any book to ask for. His friend Jones picked up at a bookstall a copy of Walker's "Paraphrase of Epictetus," which seems to have charmed the young shoemaker immensely, and to have turned him for a time into a regular stoic.