At Salisbury, the scene of so many of his sister Patty’s sorrows, Wesley writes: “I was as in a new world. The congregation was alive, and much more the society. How pleasing would it be, to be always with such! But this is not our calling.” Wesley had seen dark days here; but now the sun was shining. After the desolation caused by Westley Hall’s disgraceful conduct, the few remaining Methodists took possession of a shop in Greencroft Street, and then, in 1759, built themselves a chapel.[73] Barbara Hunt was one of their chief members,--a brave young woman, now thirty-three years old, but who lived long enough to be a Methodist threescore years and three, and died exclaiming, “O how glad should I be to clap my glad wings and tower away!”[74] Another was David Saunders, the hero of Mrs. Hannah More’s “Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.” “His coat,” says the fair authoress, perhaps mixing a little fiction with fact,--“his coat had been, in a long course of years, so often patched with different sorts of cloth, that it was now become hard to say which had been the original colour; his stockings were covered with darns of different coloured worsted, but had not a hole in them; his shirt, though nearly as coarse as the sails of a ship, was as white as the drifted snow; his open honest countenance bore strong marks of health and cheerfulness.” His good wife was cleanly, thrifty, and a hard worker; and a happier man than the “shepherd of Salisbury plain” did not exist. David Saunders was a shepherd in more respects than one. While he tended his sheep, he also, as a faithful classleader, watched over the souls committed to his care. He died in peace, in 1796, at the age of eighty.[75] Wesley got back to London on October 14, but two days afterwards set out for Oxfordshire, and spent the week in preaching at Henley, Wallingford, Oxford, Witney, Broadmarston, and Wycombe. The last week in October he employed at Towcester, Northampton, Weedon, Bedford, and other intervening towns, preaching, during his five days’ tour, not fewer than seventeen times in widely distant places. At the beginning of November he went to Norfolk; at the end, he visited his old friend Perronet, at Shoreham, and preached twice in his parish church. Even here, in the vicar’s kitchen, there was Methodist preaching every Friday night, and also a Methodist society, embracing Mr. Kingswood, Mr. Sharp, old Mrs. Lightfoot and her servant maid, poor dame Cacket, and bold, masculine minded Miss D. Perronet at the head of them.[76] Except short tours to Kent and Sussex, the remainder of the year was employed in London, where he received letters from Boardman and Pilmoor in America, and which he read to the London society. He was importuned to visit America himself; and, though such a visit was utterly impracticable, yet he was far from hasty in declining it. Hence the following, addressed to his friend, the Rev. Walter Sellon.