small income. She was rosy, and carried herself with a sweet
serenity. People said Wesley would not need a wife as long as he had
such a mother. But he did not have her long. Only a month later she
died, and while the boy was still striving to play the rôle of hero
in that calamity, there came news of another. His professor friend
had a son in the trenches. The son had been wounded, and the father
had obeyed a hurried call, found his son dead, and himself died of
the shock on the return voyage. Wesley, mourning the man who had been
his stanch friend, was guiltily conscious of his thwarted ambition.
"There goes my city church," he thought, and flung the thought back
at himself in anger at his own self-seeking. He was forced into
accepting the first opportunity which offered. His mother had an
annuity, which he himself had insisted upon for her greater comfort.
When she died, the son was nearly penniless, except for the house,
which was old and in need of repair.

He rented that as soon as he received his call to Brookville, after
preaching a humiliating number of trial sermons in other places.
Wesley was of the lowly in mind, with no expectation of inheriting
the earth, when he came to rest in the little village and began
boarding at Mrs. Solomon Black's. But even then he did not know how
bad the situation really was. He had rented his house, and the rent
kept him in decent clothes, but not enough books. He had only a
little shelf filled with the absolutely necessary volumes, most of
them relics of his college course. He did not know that there was
small chance of even his meager salary being paid until June, and he
had been ordained in February. He had wondered why nobody said
anything about his reimbursement. He had refrained from mentioning
it, to even his deacons.