r Thomas's services. He was thrown out for
Suffolk, and Mr. Robert Newton Shaw, a Whig, reigned in his stead. How
delighted we all were! Now had come the golden age, and the millennium
was at hand. Pensioners and place men were no longer to fatten on the
earnings of a suffering people, Radical politicians even looked forward
to the time when the parson would lose his tithes.

The villagers rarely left the village; they got work at the neighbouring
farms, and if they did not, they did not do so badly under the old Poor
Laws, which paid a premium to the manufacturers of large families. The
cottages were miserable hovels then, as they mostly are, and charity had
full scope for exercise, especially at Christmas time, when those who
went to the parish church were taught the blessedness of serving God and
mammon. At one time the dear old chapel would hold all the meetingers;
but soon came sectarian divisions and animosities. There was a great
Baptist preacher at Beccles of the name of Wright, and of a Sunday some
of our people walked eight miles to hear him, and came back more sure
that they were the elect than ever, and more contemptuous of the poor
blinded creatures who, to use a term much in common then, sat under my
father. Now and then the Ranters got hold of a barn, and then there was
another secession. Perhaps we had too much theological disputation. I
think we had; but then there was nothing else to think about. The people
had no cheap newspapers, and if they had they could not have read them,
and so they saw signs and had visions, and told how the Lord had
converted them by visible manifestations of His presence and power.
Well, they were happy, and they needed somewhat to make them happy amidst
the abounding poverty and desolation of their lives. By means of a
vehicle--called a whiskey--which was drawn by a mule or a pony, as chance
might determine, the family of which I was a member occasionally visited
Southwold, prettier than it is now, or Lowestoft, which had no port,
merely a long row of houses climbing up to the cliff; or Beccles, then
supposed to be a very genteel town, and where there was a ladies'
boarding school; or to Bungay, where John Childs, a sturdy opponent in
later years of Church rates and Bible monopoly, carried on a large
printing business for the London publishers, and cultivated politics and
phrenology. It was a grand outing for us all. Sometimes we got as far
as Halesworth, where