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 vestrymen left the church in a body. A peace-*making worshipper ventured up to the pulpit with a remonstrance, only to be met with a drawn pistol in the clerical hand, and an oath-*ful threat of immediate happy despatch if he interfered with the service. That his wild career included the murder of one Dulany in a duel, and the plotted assassination of another, and that he died an unknown, drunken outcast of London streets, is the shameful and pitiful ending of this o'ertrue tale. That he has been succeeded by a long line of devout and godly men has long ago effaced the stain he left upon the parish annals.

Some miles to the northeast of the town a young man, Robert Strawbridge by name, who had imbibed the doctrines of the Wesleys, formed a class after their ideas in 1764, which Bishop Asbury said was "the first in Maryland and America." The small log chapel which they built antedated any other Methodist meeting-house in America by three years, which gives the county the right to the title of the Mother of American Methodism.

History was fast making in those days. In 1764 the Stamp Act was passed, and a commissioner was appointed to distribute the