Susanna Wesley

88 SUSANNA WESLEY.
the purpose of being repapered, behold ! there came
to light, in one room, in Mrs. Wesley's own handwriting,
the names, ages, and measurements of height
of all the children alive when the family took possession
of the new house. Doubtless those who had been
away were much grown, and it was a matter of natural
parental interest to see exactly their respective heights.
fathers and mothers have taken such measures
Many
of their boys and girls, and delighted in comparing
notes of their stature at various ages.
Fruit trees were planted to run over the front and
back of the new parsonage ; mulberry, cherry, and
pear-trees in the garden, and walnuts in the adjoining
field or croft. This was indeed planting for posterity !
The re-building seems to have been completed within
the year, and cost four hundred pounds, a terrible sum
of money for a poor clergyman who had no fireinsurance
company to help him. Then the children
were collected, and the mother once more resumed her
daily work of teaching them. It was not all such plain
sailing as before they had been scattered abroad she
; found many bad habits to correct, and, besides, the discipline
of home was broken through, and its bonds had
to be tightened and perhaps somewhat strained. Then
it was that she began the custom of singing a hymn
or psalm before beginning lessons in the morning or
after leaving them off in the afternoon ;
and then, too,
she appears to have used, as text-books for religious
instruction, the expositions of the principles of revealed
religion, and of the being and perfections of
God, which she had written for her eldest son soon
after he went to Westminster, and those of the
Apostle's Creed and Ten Commandments, which she
had prepared during the year of comparative leisure