is now a broad and firm macadamised road through Wednesbury, part of the great Holyhead Road. Eighteen years before this happening, an Act of Parliament had been passed for repairing and turnpiking the road between Wednesbury and Birmingham; but, although the turnpike gates may have been in existence, the road itself certainly does not seem to have been repaired, and must have remained in the condition described in the preamble to that Act, when it was “so ruinous and bad that in the winter season many parts thereof are impassable for waggons and carriages, and very dangerous for travellers.” At the same time, the road on the other side of Wednesbury was “in a ruinous condition, and in some places very narrow and incommodious”; so it is evident that Wednesbury was in the unenviable but by no means unique position of being islanded amid execrable and scarcely practicable roads. In his old age Wesley occasionally made use of coaches and chaises, which were then a great deal better and more numerous than they had been forty years earlier, when he commenced his labours; but he did not give up the saddle until very near the last. In 1779, being then in his seventy-seventh year, he was still so active that on one day he rode from Worcester to Brecon, sixty miles, and preached on his arrival there. In 1782, when eighty, he still travelled, according to his own computation, four or five thousand miles a year, rose early, preached, and possessed the faculty of sleeping, night or day, whenever he desired to do so. When he began to travel he rose at the most astonishing hours--hours unknown even to the early-rising, hard-riding, hard-living travellers of that time. Let us look at his record for February 1746, along the Great North Road:-- “_16th February._--I rose soon after three. I was wondering the day before at the mildness of the weather, such as seldom attends me in my journeys; but my wonder now ceased. The wind was turned full north, and blew so exceeding hard and keen that when we came (from London) to Hatfield neither my companions nor I had much use of our hands or feet. After resting an hour, we bore up again through the wind and snow, which drove full in our faces; but this was only a squall. In Baldock field the storm began in earnest; the large hail drove so vehemently in our faces that we could not see, nor hardly breathe; however, before two o’clock we reached Baldock, where one met and conducted us safe to Potton. About six I preached to a serious congregation.