Page:Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886).djvu/40

28 How patiently she taught was shown when, one day, her husband had the curiosity to sit by and count while she repeated the same thing to one child more than twenty times. "I wonder at your patience," said he; "you have told that child twenty times that same thing." "If I had satisfied myself by mentioning it only nineteen times," she answered, "I should have lost all my labour. It was the twentieth time that crowned it."

Mrs. Wesley does not seem to have thought much of her own system of education, but she could not suffer her children to run wild, and could not afford either governesses, tutors, or schools. The only way of teaching them was to do it herself, and, while they were quietly gathered round her with their tasks, she plied her needle, kept the glebe accounts, wrote her letters, and nursed her baby in far more ease and comfort than she could have done if the little crew had been racing about and getting into boisterous mischief. It was at the desire of her son John, when a man of thirty, and perhaps with his own aspirations to family life, that she wrote down the details of how she brought up and taught her children, and that record is best given in her own words.