Page:The English Peasant.djvu/364

 affairs of this life." Before he could take possession a troublesome lawsuit followed. It is to the removal of his furniture to this place, which was called Cricklewood House, that he refers in the extract above quoted.

His income at this time from the chapel is said to have been about £2000 a year, in addition to which he must have derived considerable profit from his numerous publications. People now, finding he was so well off, began to load him with gifts. Thus one sent him some guinea-fowls, another some barn-door fowls, another a goose and gander, another some turkeys, another a hive of bees; two or three persons sent him sheep and ewes and lambs, another a cow, while one person sent three hundred gooseberry and currant plants, fourscore standard trees, and would insist upon keeping his garden stocked in seeds and plants. Friends in the country, especially from Sussex, kept sending him malt and peas and oats. Presents in money came freely in, apparently just as he needed it; occasionally fifty pounds at a time. But not satisfied with loading their teacher. with all this wealth, some of his admirers were bent upon seeing him move about with as much magnificence as the greatest in the land. So one day up drove a fine new coach and a pair of horses, with the initials of his name and the initials of his state, "W. H., S.S.," emblazoned on the panels of the doors, on the pads of the harness, and on the blinkers of the bridles.

It was contrary to Huntington's nature and to his principles to hoard, so that he probably spent quite as quickly as he received. Not only did he freely invite his former friends and acquaintances to his house, and help his own poor relations; not only did he love to do real practical works of benevolence, such as setting men up in business; but remembering how delighted he had been when a poor man with an extra shilling, he could never hire a coach, or cross the river in a wherry, but he must pay double as much as any other man. When he travelled he would give the postboys half a sovereign; he was known on one occasion to have slipped a sovereign into a boatman's hand for merely taking him to look over a ship at Woolwich; on another he gave the same amount to a poor cottager for giving him and a friend a cup of tea. In keeping with such reckless munificence is the story told of his