guineas per annum; and in which Wesley preached only about two months previous to his death, taking as his text words which his long life had illustrated: “The king’s business requires haste.”[261] There is Lambeth, where, in 1772, good old John Edwards opened his house for preaching; and then converted an adjoining building into a decent chapel; a man of vigorous mind, retentive memory, and fluent speech; for almost forty years an effective local preacher, and who, while on a preaching expedition, died at Irchester, in the county of Northampton, in 1803.[262] In London East, there was the old chapel in Gravel Lane, which, in 1811, was required for the London Docks; and its successor in Back Road, required by the Black wall railway company.[263] There was the schoolroom near Mill Pond Bridge, Rotherhithe, succeeded by the purchased chapel in Albion Street.[264] There was Hoxton chapel, which originally belonged to the Dissenters; and there were the venerable meeting-houses at Wapping, Snowsfields, Peckham, and other places. All these have a history well worth writing, to say nothing of the parent of them all, the old pantile Foundery, Methodism’s honoured cradle; and of which the Methodists retained possession, at least as late as the year 1785, when they received for it, in the shape of rent, £14 per year.[265] Then how rich the mine of London Methodist biography! Confining ourselves to Wesley’s days, there is--Mary Cheesebrook, originally a kept mistress, converted in West Street chapel, never absent from the Foundery preaching, though, to be in time, she often had to run the distance, and who, every Saturday, after paying her little debts, gave away all the money she had left, leaving the morrow to take thought for the things of itself:--Mrs. Witham, a mother in Israel, an eminent pattern of calm boldness for the truth, of simplicity and godly sincerity, of unwearied constancy in attending all the ordinances of God, of zeal for God and for all good works, and of self denial in every kind:--Elizabeth Langdon, whose trials were severe, and her death tranquil:--Hannah Lee, a model of industry, meekness, and patience:--Mary Naylor, distinguished for her Christian courage, and plainness of speech and of apparel:--Thomas Salmon, a good and useful man:--Joseph Norbury, a faithful witness of Jesus Christ:--William Hurd, a son of affliction, whose end was peace:--John Matthews, who, for some months before his death, was wont to say, “I have no more doubt of being in heaven, than if I was there already”; and of whom Wesley writes: “A man of so faultless a behaviour I have hardly ever been acquainted with. During twenty years, I do not remember his doing or saying anything which I would wish to have been unsaid or undone”:--Ann Wheeler, who, twenty-five years before her death, while attending preaching in Moorfields, was struck in the forehead with a stone, the mark of which her unborn daughter bore to