Susanna Wesley

72 SUSANNA WESLEY.
One can imagine how rapidly the fire spread through
a house built only of timber and plaster, with a thatched
roof, and how difficult it was to get out with life and
limb safe, without stopping for clothes or wraps. A
day or two afterwards Mr. Wesley, who apparently was
unaware that his wife had summoned up strength and
energy to write to her eldest boy at Westminster,
wrote a more detailed account to the Duke of Buckingham
:
" Righteous
is the Lord, and just in all His judgments
! I am grieved that I must write what will,
I doubt, afflict your Grace, concerning your still
unfortunate servant.
I think I am enough recollected
to give a tolerable account of it.
" On Wednesday last, at half an hour after eleven
at night, in a quarter of an hour's time or less, my
house at Epworth was burnt down to the ground
I hope, by accident, but God knows all. We had
been brewing, but had done all ; every spark of fire
quenched before five o'clock that evening at least
six hours before the house was on fire. Perhaps the
chimney above might take fire (though
it had been
swept not long since) and break through into the
thatch. Yet it is strange I should neither see nor
smell anything of it, having been in my study in that
part of the house till above half an hour after ten.
Then I locked the doors of that part of the house
where my wheat and other corn lay, which was
threshed, and went to bed.
" The servants had not been in bed a quarter of an
hour when the fire began. My wife being near her
time, and very weak, I lay in the next chamber. A
little after eleven I heard ' Fire ! cried in the street,
next to which I lay. If I had been in my own chain-
'