We have in hand a new and very laborious undertaking, on account of its great distance from home. But the object appeared to me so important, that I did not feel myself at liberty to neglect it. It is a parish, the largest in our county or diocese, in a state of great depravity and ignorance. The opposition I have met with in endeavoring to establish an institution for the religious instruction of these people would excite your astonishment. The principal adversary is a farmer of £1000 a year, who says the lower classes are _fated_ to be wicked and ignorant, and that as wise as I am I cannot alter what is _decreed_. He has labored to ruin the poor curate for favoring our cause, and says he shall not have a workman to obey him, for I shall make them all as wise as himself. In spite of this hostility, however, which far exceeds anything I have met with, I am building a house, and taking up things on such a large scale, that you must not be surprised if I get into jail for debt (even should I escape it for my irregular proceedings, which is the most to be feared).... Providence, I trust, will carry me through the business of this new undertaking; for, in spite of the active malevolence we experience, I have brought already between three and four hundred under a course of instruction: the worst part of the story is, that thirty miles there and back is a little too much these short days; and when we get there, our house has as yet neither windows nor doors; but if we live till next summer, things will mend, and in so precarious a world as this is, a winter was not to be lost! HANNAH MORE: _Letter to Mrs. Kennicott_, 1798, in ‘Memoirs,’ by W, Roberts. * * * * * [Sidenote: Her friends.] It was remarked by Mrs. More that she never lost a friend but by death; and as she continued to the last enlarging the number of this privileged order, she had, in her later years, and in her rural seclusion, less time at command than she had enjoyed at Hampton, when her evenings passed in the crowded saloons of the fashionable and the literary. To save her own time, as well as to accommodate her numerous visitors, she opened her house daily from twelve or one o’clock to three, for what she not inappropriately termed her “levee.” This, however, was far from securing the rest of her time for solitude, as friends from distant quarters were frequently besetting Barley Wood, and making importunate and irresistible demands on her leisure. Ingenious, however, to do good, she now employed herself in manufacturing little useful and ornamental articles, to be sold at fancy fairs for charitable purposes; the fact that they were the produce of her industry investing them with many times their intrinsic value. The same energy which distinguished her literary pursuits, was conspicuous in this humbler path of usefulness. On one occasion of this sort, she knitted so assiduously as to produce an abscess in her hand. [Sidenote: Her industry.]