The origin of the meeting had been odd.  A few years before we came, a crew of Cornish fishermen, quite unknown to the villagers, were driven by stress of weather into the haven under the cliff.  They landed, and, instead of going to a public-house, they looked about for a room where they could hold a prayer-meeting.  They were devout Wesleyans; they had come from the open sea, they were far from home, and they had been starved by lack of their customary religious privileges.  As they stood about in the street before their meeting, they challenged the respectable girls who came out to stare at them, with the question, ’Do you love the Lord Jesus, my maid?’ Receiving dubious answers, they pressed the inhabitants to come in and pray with them, which several did.  Ann Burmington, who long afterwards told me about it, was one of those girls, and she repeated that the fishermen said, ’What a dreadful thing it will be, at the Last Day, when the Lord says, “Come, ye blessed”, and says it not to you, and then, “Depart ye cursed”, and you maidens have to depart.’  They were finely-built young men, with black beards and shining eyes, and I do not question that some flash of sex unconsciously mingled with the curious episode, although their behaviour was in all respects discreet.  It was, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence that almost all those particular girls remained unmarried to the end of their lives.  After two or three days, the fishermen went off to sea again.  They prayed and sailed away, and the girls, who had not even asked their names, never heard of them again.  But several of the young women were definitely converted, and they formed the nucleus of our little gathering.

My Father preached, standing at a desk; or celebrated the communion in front of a deal table, with a white napkin spread over it.  Sometimes the audience was so small, generally so unexhilarating, that he was discouraged, but he never flagged in energy and zeal.  Only those who had given evidence of intelligent acceptance of the theory of simple faith in their atonement through the Blood of Jesus were admitted to the communion, or, as it was called, ‘the Breaking of Bread’.  It was made a very strong point that no one should ‘break bread’, unless for good reason shown—­until he or she had been baptized, that is to say, totally immersed, in solemn conclave, by the ministering brother.  This rite used, in our earliest days, to be performed, with picturesque simplicity, in the sea on the Oddicombe beach, but to this there were, even in those quiet years, extreme objections.  A jeering crowd could scarcely be avoided, and women, in particular, shrank from the ordeal.  This used to be a practical difficulty, and my Father, when communicants confessed that they had not yet been baptized, would shake his head and say gravely, ‘Ah! ah! you shun the Cross of Christ!’ But that baptism in the sea on the open beach was a ‘cross’, he would not deny, and when we built our own little chapel, a sort of font, planked over, was arranged in the room itself.