Page:The English Peasant.djvu/341

 This sort of existence brought on a severe illness, which overtook him at Danbury, in Essex. However, a good Samaritan in the shape of the hostess of the "Bell" had pity upon him, and nursed and fed him as if he had been her own child.

Soon after he recommenced his wanderings he found himself in Kent, and the fear came upon him that he should be arrested for the debt now due to the parish of Cranbrook, and thrown into prison. Whereupon he thought that he would change his name from Hunt into Huntington, so that they might not find him out But like the former sin, of which this was indeed the corollary, he was severely punished for the deceit, since, after he had been long accustomed to it, and probably thought no more about it, it was discovered and exposed, and used as a handle against his fame as a public preacher. It gave him the appearance of an impostor, an appearance which an unusually sincere life and the passing away of a whole century has never entirely worn off.

And as so often happens, the fear which led to the deception was, after all, baseless. Susan Fever had already married some one else, and it would appear that soon after he had tidings of her death.

In the same year that he changed his name (1769) he married a native of Dorset—Mary Short, a hardworking, religiously disposed woman, two years older than himself. She told him that she would make a good man of him, which no doubt was one reason why he married her.

However, his domestic life began sadly enough. He lamed himself and fell ill, and soon got so low in the world as to want food. To add to his trials, his firstborn, a little girl, suddenly died.

The accumulation of trouble which had thus befallen him forced home upon him the conviction that the continued misfortune which had now dogged his steps for years was owing to his sins. He felt that he had neither known, feared, loved, nor served God as he ought.

Had Huntington lived three hundred years earlier, he would have talked his wife into letting him go and cast himself at some monastic gate, begging admission on any terms, so that he might once and for ever quit the world. But his spiritual conflict was not to be fought out in a convent, but in a cottage; not in the grave-