ought in a bare 50 pounds a
year, they could manage to live and pay their way, and feel meanwhile
that they were lessening the burden. For Dick Ellison, Sukey's
husband, had undertaken to finance Epworth tithe, and was renting the
rectory for a while with the purpose of bringing his father-in-law's
affairs to order--a filial offer which Mr. Wesley perforce accepted
while hating Dick from the bottom of his heart, and the deeper
because of this necessity.

Dick was his "wen," "more unpleasant to him than all his physic"--a
red-faced, uneducated squireen, with money in his pockets (as yet), a
swaggering manner due to want of sense rather than deliberate
offensiveness, and a loud patronising laugh which drove the Rector
mad. Comedy presided over their encounters; but such comedy as only
the ill-natured can enjoy. And the Rector, splenetic, exacting,
jealous of authority, after writhing for a time under Dick's candid
treatment of him as a child, usually cut short the scene by bouncing
off to his library and slamming the door behind him.

Even Mrs. Wesley detested her son-in-law, and called him "a coarse,
vulgar, immoral man "; but confessed (in his absence) that they were
all the better off for his help. Ease from debt she had never known;
but here at Wroote the clouds seemed to be breaking. Duns had been
fewer of late. With her poultry-yard and small dairy she was earning
a few pounds, and this gave her a sense of helpfulness she had not
known at Epworth; a pound saved may be a pound gained, but a pound
earned can be held in the hand, and the touch makes a wonderful
difference. The girls had flung themselves heartily into the
farm-work: they talked of it, at night, around the kitchen hearth
(for of the two sitting-rooms one had been given up to their father
for his library, and the other Hetty vowed to be "too grand for the
likes of dairy-women." Also the marsh-vapours in the Isle of Axholme
can be agueish after sunset, even in summer, and they found the fire
a comfort). Hetty had described these rural economies in a long
letter to Samuel at Westminster, and been answered by an "Heroick
Poem," pleasantly facetious:

"The spacious glebe around the house
Affords full pasture to the cows,
Whence largely milky nectar flows,
O sweet and cleanly dairy!"

"Unless or Moll, or Anne, or you,
Your duty should neglect to do,
And then 'ware haunches black and blue
By pinch