He became “queer.” He spoke his thoughts, and in time preached them to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered at him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel took him up. He thought he had found a rustic saint. He invited young Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the ministry. The parents were flattered by the pastor’s notice, and he found little difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists. Rather bewildered and scared at the new life before him, young Ezra Sumption, comely, burly, shock-headed, brown-skinned as a mushroom in a wet field, passed into a training college of the sect, and emerged a full-blown pastor, with black clothes on his unwieldy limbs and a tongue for ever struggling with the niceties of English speech. He was a great disappointment to his benefactor, for the smith in him had triumphantly survived all genteel training and theological examinations; he was to all intents the same boy who had heard voices in the fire and had preached to the carters. His manners and conversation had slightly improved, and his imaginings had been given a dose of dogma, but his rough uncouthness, his “queerness” remained as before. He was an utter failure as assistant pastor in a chapel at Dover—the congregation was shocked by the violence and vulgarity of his forge-born similes, his Judgment Day appeals, all the spate and fume of the old Doomsday doctrines which were fast dying out of Nonconformity. He pined for the country, and seemed unable to conform to town habits. On his holidays he went back to the forge and helped his father with the shoeing as if he had never worn a black coat. It was on one of these holidays that he finally damned himself. In a cottage at Ihornden where he had gone to visit a sick woman he met a gipsy girl of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns. Her people had given up their wandering life, and settled down in the neighbourhood, where they owned several cottages. Nevertheless, to marry her, as Sumption did soon after their third meeting, was his pastoral suicide. He took her with him to Dover, where they were both miserable for a few months. Then he had to give up his post. They returned to the forge at Bethersden, where Sumption would have liked to become a blacksmith again, if it had not been for the continual restless yearning of the Word within him, that drop of the divine which had somehow mixed with his clay, and made him drunken.