Among these quiet, taciturn people, there were several whom I recall with affection.  In this remote corner of Devonshire, on the road nowhither, they had preserved much of the air of that eighteenth century which the elders among them perfectly remembered.  There was one old man, born before the French Revolution, whose figure often recurs to me.  This was James Petherbridge, the Nestor of our meeting, extremely tall and attenuated; he came on Sundays in a full, white smockfrock, smartly embroidered down the front, and when he settled himself to listen, he would raise this smock like a skirt, and reveal a pair of immensely long thin legs, cased in tight leggings, and ending in shoes with buckles.  As the sacred message fell from my Father’s lips the lantern jaws of Mr. Petherbridge slowly fell apart, while his knees sloped to so immense a distance from one another that it seemed as though they never could meet again.  He had been pious all his life, and he would tell us, in some modest pride, that when he was a lad, the farmer’s wife who was his mistress used to say, ’I think our Jem is going to be a Methody, he do so hanker after godly discoursings.’  Mr. Petherbridge was accustomed to pray orally at our prayer-meetings, in a funny old voice like wind in a hollow tree, and he seldom failed to express a hope that ’the Lord would support Miss Lafroy’—­ who was the village schoolmistress, and one of our congregation,—­’in her labour of teaching the young idea how to shoot’.  I, not understanding this literary allusion, long believed the school to be addicted to some species of pistol-practice.

The key of the Room was kept by Richard Moxhay, the mason, who was of a generation younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet ‘getting on in years’.  Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was always dressed in white corduroy, on which any stain of Devonshire scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich Western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream.  His locks were long and sparse, and as deadly black as his clothes were white.  He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even more meek and gracious than himself.  They never, to my recollection, spoke unless they were spoken to, and their melancholy impassiveness used to vex my Father, who once, referring to the Moxhays, described them, sententiously but justly, as being ’laborious, but it would be an exaggeration to say happy, Christians’.  Indeed, my memory pictures almost all the ‘saints’ of that early time as sad and humble souls, lacking vitality, yet not complaining of anything definite.  A quite surprising number of them, it is true, male and female, suffered from different forms of consumption, so that the Room rang in winter evenings with a discord of hacking coughs.  But it seems to me that, when I was quite young, half the inhabitants of our rural district were affected with phthisis.  No doubt, our peculiar religious community was more likely to attract the feeble members of a population, than to tempt the flush and the fair.