It was here I first saw the Southern preachers, and for the first time that beautiful and amiable youth, William Capers. He, as my readers know, became one of the strong men of the South. At this time he had not been licensed to preach; he had traveled as an exhorter, and at a quarterly conference held at this camp-meeting he was licensed to preach and also recommended to the Annual Conference. Two of William Capers’s brothers, John and Gabriel, were here converted, and his father was reconciled with Bishop Asbury. Mr. Asbury used to preach at his father’s house years before, but Mr. Hammett had prejudiced his mind against the bishop, and for seventeen years he had been estranged from him. But I prefer that William Capers tell his own story. “At this camp-meeting I first saw Bishop Asbury. I was introduced to him immediately on his first coming to the camp-meeting, as I happened to be in the preachers’ tent at the time of his arrival. I approached him timidly, and with a feeling of veneration; but, ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘this is the baby; come and let me hug you,’ meaning that I was the baby when he was last at my father’s house. On my father’s entering the tent, he rose hastily from his seat and met him with his arms extended, and they embraced each other with mutual emotion. It had been seventeen years since they had seen each other, and yet the bishop asked after Sally and Gabriel, as if it had been but a few months, and repeated, gleefully, ‘I have got the baby!’ It was evident no common friendship had subsisted between them; and how much happier had those years of estrangement been to my honored father if they had been passed in the fellowship he had been seduced to leave.” Mr. Capers well adds the following, worthy to be written in a conspicuous place: “I hate schism; I abhor it as the very track and trail of him who, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.”[21] All the preachers who were at that camp-meeting in 1808 have gone the way whence they will not return, except Lovick Pierce and myself. James Rembert, with whom we were staying, was a large man in body, and equally large in soul. He was very wealthy and very benevolent. He lived in a place called Rembert’s Settlement; there was a church called Rembert’s Chapel, and James Rembert was the honored patriarch. Bishop Asbury had been here to Rembert’s Hall several times before, and always had a hearty welcome. On Monday the 28th we left Rembert’s Hall and started for Charleston. On our arrival we were the guests of Dr. William Phœbus, who was the stationed preacher. In former years I preached at his brother John’s, on the eastern shore of Maryland. The doctor was a most eccentric genius. There was dignity about him, and yet he was peculiarly odd. He was, however, quite a philosopher, and did noble service for Methodism.