As a rule, she was a bitter, unmitigated curse. At home, she was suspicious, jealous, fretful, taunting, twitting, and often violent. Abroad, when itinerating with him, it too generally happened, that nought could please her. “The weather was either intolerably cold, or insufferably hot. The roads were bad, and the means of conveyance, unbearable. The people, by whom they were accommodated, were unpolite and rude; the provisions were scanty, or ill prepared; and the beds were hard, and the covering not sufficient.”[138] Such were the whinings of a woman who began life as a domestic servant. Her husband was a gentleman and a scholar, but was almost an utter stranger to the comforts of wedded life. In lieu of them, he had annoyances, which, to most men, would have been intolerable; and it is no mean proof of the genuine greatness of his character, that during this protracted domestic wretchedness of thirty years’ continuance, his public career never wavered, nor appeared to lose one jot of its amazing energy. “He repeatedly told me,” writes Henry Moore, “that he believed the Lord overruled this painful business for his good; and that, if Mrs. Wesley had been a better wife, he might have been unfaithful in the great work to which God had called him, and might have too much sought to please her according to her own views.”[139] We must now return to the year 1751. Five weeks after his marriage, Wesley set out for the north of England. He spent Sunday, March 31, at Birmingham, where he warned the society against idle disputes and vain janglings; and was “obliged to preach abroad, the room not being able to contain half the congregation.” He writes: “O how is the scene changed here! The last time I preached at Birmingham, the stones flew on every side. If any disturbance were made now, the disturber would be in more danger than the preacher.” At Dudley, Wesley was welcomed by a “dismal screaming.” At Wednesbury, the work had been injured by “doubtful disputations.” The predestinarians had not come near the place while persecution lasted; but, “when all was calm, they poured in on every side, and bereaved us of our children.” The society was reduced from three hundred members to seventy, all of whom were weak and lifeless.[140] Throughout the whole neighbourhood, “the classes were miserably shattered by the sowers of strange doctrines,”—baptists and others included. Arriving at Bolton on the 10th of April, Wesley went to a barber to be shaved. “Sir,” said the man of lather, “I praise God on your behalf. When you were at Bolton last, I was one of the greatest drunkards in the town; but I came to listen at the window, God struck me to the heart, and twelve months ago I was converted.”