Page:Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886).djvu/84

72 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-