The “trays” for the public tea had all been given and provided in that bounteous and luxurious fashion for which the Yorkshire farm mistresses are proverbial. Hams, tongues and fowls, tarts and pies, cheese-cakes, tea-cakes, plum-cakes, rice-cakes, and other toothsome triumphs of confectionery, mingled with a profusion of plainer fare, and exhibited such a sum total of appetising edibilities, that Jabez Hepton’s tables curved and creaked beneath their weight. As for the people who gathered there on that auspicious day, it really seemed as though the whole Kesterton Circuit had immigrated to Nestleton Green. Kesterton was represented by scores of sympathisers, and every village in Messrs. Clayton and Mitchell’s pastorate sent a detachment to swell the crowd. As for Nestleton itself, why it was there bodily. On that day, at any rate, the plough might stand in the furrow, and the horses experienced two Sundays in the week. The central ceremony passed smoothly off: Squire Fuller did his unfamiliar duty in a deft and skilful way, and finished his short address of warm congratulation, by placing a hundred pounds upon the stone he had just “well and truly laid.” Two or three speeches were delivered, the indispensable collection was made, the “Doxology” and “God save the King” were sung with a perfect furore of enthusiasm, and then a general adjournment was made to the “tented field.” A battle royal succeeded; such an overwhelming charge was made upon urn and teapot, loaf and pastry, flesh and fowl, that in a very little while the boards were swept of their supplies, and the trampled ground was strewed with shattered fragments, the only surviving token of the fierceness of the fray. At the evening meeting the squire of Waverdale again took the place of honour, and delighted all his hearers with the simple relation of his religious experience, and his grateful references to the Methodist influences which had been brought to bear on himself and son. “As for good old Adam Olliver,” quoth the squire, “he is one of Nature’s noblemen. No, that won’t do either, for our grand old friend is in the highest sense a patriarch in holiness and grace. My debt to him is greater than he knows; greater than he will ever know until the light of eternity flashes on the doings of time. I desire in his name to contribute a further sum of fifty pounds, and I heartily pray that the chapel about to be built may be the means of perpetuating and multiplying such genuine specimens of piety, integrity, and goodness among the villagers of Nestleton.”