Page:Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886).djvu/100

88 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. Many fathers and mothers have taken such measures 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 fire-insurance 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