e heard somewhere; and rushing out, lo and behold! it was no
other than Diggory Dyson, the parish priest, who had gone headlong to
the bottom of the cellar steps, and had he not cut his temples against
the brass tap of a beer-barrel and bled freely, he might have died on
the spot. And that was a man set up to guide the multitude! Had he been
only led and guided by the Spirit of God, as a true minister should be,
he would never have gone neck-foremost down my cellar steps. That's your
blind leader of the blind!"

But if Johnny Darbyshire thought the "Common-Prayer priests" obscure,
they must have thought him sevenfold so. Instead of doctrines and such
pagan things, he talked solemnly of "centring down"; "being renewedly
made sensible"; "having his mind drawn to this and that thing"; "feeling
himself dipped into deep baptism"; "feeling a sense of duty"; and of
"seeing, or not seeing his way clear" into this or that matter. But his
master phrase was "living near to the truth"; and often, when other
people thought him particularly provoking and insulting, it was only
"because he hated a lie and the father of lies." Johnny thought that he
lived so near to the truth, that you would have thought Truth was his
next-door neighbor, or his lodger, and not living down at the bottom of
her well as she long has been.

Truly was that religious world in which Johnny Darbyshire lived a most
singular one. In that part of the country, George Fox had been
particularly zealous and well received. A simple country people was just
the people to be affected by his warm eloquence and strong manly sense.
He settled many meetings there, which, however, William Penn may be said
to have unsettled by his planting of Pennsylvania. These Friends flocked
over thither with, or after him, and left a mere remnant behind them.
This remnant--and it was like the remnant in a draper's shop, a very
old-fashioned one--continued still to keep up their meetings, and carry
on their affairs as steadily and gravely as Fox and his contemporaries
did, if not so extensively and successfully. They had a meeting at
Codnor Breach, at Monny-Ash in the Peak, at Pentridge, at Toad-hole
Furnace, at Chesterfield, etc. Most of these places were thoroughly
country places, some of them standing nearly alone in the distant
fields; and the few members belonging to them might be seen on Sundays,
mounted on strong horses, a man and his wife often on one, on saddle and
pillion, or in