At the grave came the sober warnings to the living and sometimes frightful prophesies as to the state of the dead.

All this pageantry of woe and visions of the unknown land beyond the tomb, often haunted my midnight dreams and shadowed the sunshine of my days.

The parsonage, with its bare walls and floors, its shriveled mistress and her blind sister, more like ghostly shadows than human flesh and blood; the two black servants, racked with rheumatism and odoriferous with a pungent oil they used in the vain hope of making their weary limbs more supple; the aged parson buried in his library in the midst of musty books and papers--all this only added to the gloom of my surroundings.

The church, which was bare, with no furnace to warm us, no organ to gladden our hearts, no choir to lead our songs of praise in harmony, was sadly lacking in all attractions for the youthful mind.

The preacher, shut up in an octagonal box high above our heads, gave us sermons over an hour long, and the chorister, in a similar box below him, intoned line after line of David's Psalms, while, like a flock of sheep at the heels of their shepherd, the congregation, without regard to time or tune, straggled after their leader.
Years later, the introduction of stoves, a violoncello, Wesley's hymns, and a choir split the church in twain.