or even for acquaintance, was sociable in an unrefined way.  There were assemblies, dances, races, card-parties, and a bowling-green, at which the little world met and enjoyed itself.  From these the new convert, in his spiritual ecstasy, of course turned away as mere modes of murdering time.  Three families received him with civility, two of them with cordiality; but the chief acquaintances he made were with “odd scrambling fellows like himself;” an eccentric water-drinker and vegetarian who was to be met by early risers and walkers every morning at six o’clock by his favourite spring; a char-parson, of the class common in those days of sinecurism and non-residence, who walked sixteen miles every Sunday to serve two churches, besides reading daily prayers at Huntingdon, and who regaled his friend with ale brewed by his own hands.  In his attached servant the recluse boasted that he had a friend; a friend he might have, but hardly a companion.

For the first days and even weeks, however, Huntingdon seemed a paradise.  The heart of its new inhabitant was full of the unspeakable happiness that comes with calm after storm, with health after the most terrible of maladies, with repose after the burning fever of the brain.  When first he went to church he was in a spiritual ecstasy; it was with difficulty that he restrained his emotions, though his voice was silent, being stopped by the intensity of his feelings, his heart within him sang for joy; and when the Gospel for the day was read, the sound of it was more than he could well bear.  This brightness of his mind communicated itself to all the objects round him, to the sluggish waters of the Ouse, to dull, fenny Huntingdon, and to its commonplace inhabitants.

For about three months his cheerfulness lasted, and with the help of books, and his rides to meet his brother, he got on pretty well; but then “the communion which he had so long been able to maintain with the Lord was suddenly interrupted.”  This is his theological version of the case; the rationalistic version immediately follows:  “I began to dislike my solitary situation, and to fear I should never be able to weather out the winter in so lonely a dwelling.”  No man could be less fitted to bear a lonely life; persistence in the attempt would soon have brought back his madness.  He was longing for a home; and a home was at hand to receive him.  It was not perhaps one of the happiest kind; but the influence which detracted from its advantages was the one which rendered it hospitable to the wanderer.  If Christian piety was carried to a morbid excess beneath its roof, Christian charity opened its door.