reason or other the Independents were really the Dissenters, and until
the "cause" had dwindled, as before observed, all the Dissenters of any
note were to be found on Sunday in their meeting-house in Water Lane.

My predecessor had died in harness at the age of seventy-five. I never
knew him, but from all I could hear he must have been a man of some
power. As he got older, however, he became feeble; and after a course
of three sermons on a Sunday for fifty years, what he had to say was so
entirely anticipated by his congregation, that although they all
maintained that the gospel, or, in other words, the doctrine of the
fall, the atonement, and so forth, should continually be presented, and
their minister also believed and acted implicitly upon the same theory,
they fell away--some to the Baptists, some to the neighbouring
Independents about two miles off, and some to the Church, while a few
"went nowhere."

When I came I found that the deacons still remained true. They were
the skeleton; but the flesh was so woefully emaciated, that on my first
Sunday there were not above fifty persons in a building which would
hold seven hundred. These deacons were four in number. One was an old
farmer who lived in a village three miles distant. Ever since he was a
boy he had driven over to Water Lane on Sunday. He and his family
brought their dinner with them, and ate it in the vestry; but they
never stopped till the evening, because of the difficulty of getting
home on dark nights, and because they all went to bed in winter-time at
eight o'clock.

Morning and afternoon Mr. Catfield--for that was his name--gave out the
hymns. He was a plain, honest man, very kind, very ignorant, never
reading any book except the Bible, and barely a newspaper save Bell's