“Where am I? Sure Paradise is round me; Sweets planted by the hand of heaven grow here, And every sense is full of thy perfection! To hear thee speak might calm a madman’s frenzy, Till by attention he forgot his sorrows; But to behold thy eyes, th’ amazing beauties Would make him rage again with love, as I do; Thou Nature’s whole perfection in one piece! Sure, framing thee, Heaven took unusual care; As its own beauty, it designed thee fair, And formed thee by the best loved angel there.” Such were the emotions Philip Fuller felt as he turned away from the Forge of Nathan Blyth. Rounding the corner in the direction of Waverdale Hall, he was suddenly confronted by the scowling face and suspicious eyes of Black Morris. CHAPTER VII. KESTERTON CIRCUIT AND THE “ROUNDERS.” “A good man there was of religioun, And he was a poor parsoun of a toune; But rich he was of holy thought and werk. He was, also, a learned man, a clerk That Christe’s gospel gladly wolde preche; His parischens devoutly wolde he teche. Benign he was and wondrous diligent, And in adversite full patient.” _Chaucer._ Methodism was introduced into Kesterton in the days of John Wesley himself, and in the plain, square, old-fashioned chapel, with its arched windows, brick walls, and hip roof, red tiled and high peaked, you might see the very pulpit in which the grand old apostle of the eighteenth century preached more than a hundred years ago. The chapel stood back from the main street, and to get at it you had to go through a narrow passage, for the fathers of the Methodist Church, unlike their more self-assertive successors, seem to have courted a very modest retirement for the Bethels which they built for God. Behind the chapel there is a small burial-ground, in which are the honoured graves of those to whom Kesterton Methodism owes its origin, and who did its work and bore its fortunes in its earlier struggles for existence. On the other side of an intervening wall, in the midst of a little garden, capable of much improvement in the matter of tidiness and cultivation, stands the “preacher’s house.” It is not by any means an imposing structure, and taxes to the utmost the contrivance of its itinerant tenants to find sleeping accommodation for the “quiver full” of youngsters with which they are commonly favoured in an unusual degree. In the matter of furniture the less said the better; suffice it to say that it could not be regarded as extravagant in quality or burdensome in quantity. Indeed, it was open to serious imputations in both those directions; at least so thought the Rev. Theophilus Clayton, who had latterly become located there, and seemed likely to go through the maximum term of three years, to the high satisfaction of the people, and with a moderate measure of contentment to himself.