Wesley had been incessantly travelling for nearly the last six months; but no sooner were the sessions of the Bristol conference ended, than he started off to Cornwall, where he spent the interval between August 26 and September 18. On his way, he preached to a serious congregation at Taunton, and asks, “Shall we have fruit here also?” Wesley might well ask this. For many a long year, he had been accustomed to preach at Taunton, and had been received either with stupid indifference or active contempt. As early as 1744, he attempted to preach in the yard of the Three Cups inn; but had no sooner named his text, than the mayor came, in all his full blown dignity, and ordered the proclamation to be read, and silenced the preacher.[35] Almost a quarter of a century had elapsed since then; and now there was a small society, of which one of the members was Thomas Dingle, who for sixty-three years was a chief supporter of the Taunton society, and one of its brightest ornaments. Wesley’s labours in Cornwall were Herculean. Though now in the sixty-sixth year of his age, for eight days together he preached, “mostly in the open air, three or four times a day,” and says, “I hardly felt any weariness, first or last.” He was also not without adventures. At Polperro, his bedroom was filled with pilchards and conger eels, which made him glad to accept the offer of another. At Plymouth, on his return, a “silly man talked without ceasing” during the sermon, till Wesley desired the people “to open to the right and left, and let him look his garrulous disturber fairly in the face,” upon which the noisy prater “pulled off his hat, and quietly went away.” Between Charlton and Lympsham, the rivers were so swollen, that Wesley’s horse had to swim, and Wesley himself had to be taken to his lodgings on an “honest man’s shoulders.” Reaching Bristol on September 24, Wesley spent the next few days in visiting the neighbouring towns and villages. At Frome, he found the liveliest society that there was in the Wiltshire circuit: a fact which greatly surprised him, because the town was made up of a strange medley “of men of all opinions,--anabaptists, quakers, presbyterians, Arians, antinomians, Moravians, and what not.” He adds: “if any hold to the truth, in the midst of all these, surely the power must be of God.”