From Hull, Wesley and his wife proceeded to Pocklington, where he had been announced to preach, though there was no society, and scarcely a converted person in the town. The room, which had been provided for the preaching, was five yards square, which Wesley reasonably enough thought too small. A yard was looked at, but it was plentifully furnished with stones, and Wesley’s experience taught him that these might be dangerous artillery in the hands of the “devil’s drunken companions.” At last, a gentleman offered a large commodious barn, in which Wesley had the most blessed season of refreshing that he had had since his leaving London. At York, a magistrate had stuck up in public places, and distributed in private houses, part of Lavington’s Papists and Methodists Compared; and hence, as soon as Wesley and his spouse passed through the city gates, they were saluted with bitter curses. At Osmotherley, he visited a scoffer at all religion, who was either raving mad, or possessed of the devil. The woman told him, that the devil had appeared and talked to her for some time, the day before, and had leaped upon, and grievously tormented her ever since. Wesley says: “We prayed with her. Her agonies ceased. She fell asleep, and awoke in the morning calm and easy.” Osmotherley tradition says, that the name of this maniac was Elizabeth Whitfield. Wesley reached Newcastle, the centre of his northern peregrinations, on April 30. At Sunderland, he “found one of the liveliest societies in the north of England. This,” says he, “is the effect of their being so much under the law, as to scruple, one and all, the buying even milk on a Sunday.” He preached at Alemouth, and made this remarkable entry in his Journal: “How plain an evidence have we here, that even our outward work, even the societies, are not of man’s building! With all our labour and skill, we cannot, in nine years’ time, form a society in this place; even though there is none that opposes, poor or rich; nay, though the two richest men in the town, and the only gentlemen there, have done all which was in their power to further it.” At Wickham, he met with a remarkable case. Mrs. Armstrong, before whose house he preached, was an old lady of more than fourscore years of age. From childhood, the Bible had been her companion; but recently, on mounting her spectacles, she was not able to see a word. She took them off; looked again; and could read as well as her daughter could. “From that hour, she could not only read without spectacles, but sew, or thread the finest needle, with the same ease as when she was thirty.” At Barnard Castle, the mob was numerous and loud. The rabble fetched out the fire engine to play upon the congregation; but John Monkhouse, great grandfather of the late Rev. Thomas Monkhouse, seized the pipe, and diverted the stream from Wesley, so that, as he remarks, “not a drop fell on him.”[172]