Such, then, were the father and the uncle of Samuel Wesley’s mother. Of herself little is known. As already shown, her father died when she was young. Her uncle died when her husband was suffering imprisonment for conscience’ sake. Her husband died about the early age of thirty-four, leaving her nothing but his holy example, his loving prayers, and at least two young children. How she obtained a living, in the early years of her widowhood, there is no evidence to show; but, in her later years, she was obliged to depend on the little help of £10 per annum, which her son Samuel was accustomed to squeeze out of his sadly too small Epworth income. The whole of her married life was one continued scene of persecution; and the forty years of her long and dreary widowhood, was an unceasing struggle with poverty and its attendant pain. She was alive in 1710.—See Clarke’s “Wesley Family,” vol. ii. p. 144. Would that we knew more of her suffering history! [The facts in this chapter have been collected from Beal’s _Fathers of the Wesley Family_, Clarendon’s _History of the Rebellion_, Anthony Wood’s _Athenæ Oxoniensis_, Orme’s _Life of Dr John Owen_, Chalmers’s _General Biographical Dictionary_, Fuller’s _Worthies of England_; and also from other books and tracts mentioned in the chapter itself.] CHAPTER III. SCHOOL DAYS—1662–1683. Samuel Wesley was born at Winterborn-Whitchurch, at the close of the year 1662. He was educated at the Free School, at Dorchester, by Mr Henry Dolling, to whom, out of respect, he dedicated the first work that he published.[13] Dorchester Free School was built by Edward Hardy, of Wyke, near Weymouth, about the year 1579. Young Wesley remained here until he was a little more than fifteen years of age, when he was sent to an academy in London. He continued in London until August 1683, when he had nearly arrived at the age of twenty-one. ----- Footnote 13: Mr Dolling became master of Dorchester School in 1664, and held the office until 1675. He was LL.B of Wadham College, Oxford; and translated “The Whole Duty of Man” into Latin. The work, a copy of which is in the Dorchester School Library, was licensed in 1678.—HUTCHIN’S _History of Dorsetshire_. -----