The village, at the southern end of which our villa stood, was not pretty.  It had no rural picturesqueness of any kind.  The only pleasant feature of it, the handsome and ancient parish church with its umbrageous churchyard, was then almost entirely concealed by a congress of mean shops, which were ultimately, before the close of my childhood, removed.  The village consisted of two parallel lines of contiguous houses, all white-washed and most of them fronted by a trifling shop-window; for half a mile this street ascended to the church, and then descended for another half-mile, ending suddenly in fields, the hedges of which displayed, at intervals, the inevitable pollard elm-tree.

The walk through the village, which we seemed make incessantly, was very wearisome to me.  I dreaded the rudeness of the children, and there was nothing in the shops to amuse me.  Walking on the inch or two of broken pavement in front of the houses was disagreeable and tiresome, and the odor which breathed on close days from the open doors and windows made me feel faint.  But this walk was obligatory, since the ‘Public Room’, as our little chapel was called, lay at the farther extremity of the dreary street.

We attended this place of worship immediately on our arrival, and my Father, uninvited but unresisted, immediately assumed the administration of it.  It was a square, empty room, built, for I know not what purpose, over a stable.  Ammoniac odours used to rise through the floor as we sat there at our long devotions.  Before our coming, a little flock of persons met in the Room, a community of the indefinite sort just then becoming frequent in the West of England, pious rustics connected with no other recognized body of Christians, and depending directly on the independent study of the Bible.  They were largely women, but there was more than a sprinkling of men, poor, simple and generally sickly.  In later days, under my Father’s ministration, the body increased and positively flourished.  It came to include retired professional men, an admiral, nay, even the brother of a peer.  But in those earliest years the ‘brethren’ and ‘sisters’ were all of them ordinary peasants.  They were jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washerwomen and domestic servants.  I wish that I could paint, in colours so vivid that my readers could perceive what their little society consisted of, this quaint collection of humble, conscientious, ignorant and gentle persons.  In chronicle or fiction I have never been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them.  The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is featureless.