Another of our cottage acquaintance was a market-gardener, from whom we frequently bought vegetables; from the wife of this man we one day received a very civil invitation to “please to come and pass the evening with them in prayer.”  The novelty of the circumstance, and its great dissimilarity to the ways and manners of our own country, induced me to accept the invitation, and also to record the visit here.

We were received with great attention, and a place was assigned us on one of the benches that surrounded the little parlour.  Several persons, looking like mechanics and their wives, were present; every one sat in profound silence, and with that quiet subdued air, that serious people assume on entering a church.  At length, a long, black, grim-looking man entered; his dress, the cut of his hair, and his whole appearance, strongly recalled the idea of one of Cromwell’s fanatics.  He stepped solemnly into the middle of the room, and took a chair that stood there, but not to sit upon it; he turned the back towards him, on which he placed his hands, and stoutly uttering a sound between a hem and a cough, he deposited freely on either side of him a considerable portion of masticated tobacco.  He then began to preach.  His text was “Live in hope,” and he continued to expound it for two hours in a drawling, nasal tone, with no other respite than what he allowed himself for expectoration.  If I say that he repeated the words of this text a hundred times, I think I shall not exceed the truth, for that allows more than a minute for each repetition, and in fact the whole discourse was made up of it.  The various tones in which he uttered it might have served as a lesson on emphasis; as a question—­in accents of triumph—­in accents of despair—­of pity—­of threatening—­of authority—­of doubt—­of hope—­of faith.  Having exhausted every imaginable variety of tone, he abruptly said, “Let us pray,” and twisting his chair round, knelt before it.  Every one knelt before the seat they had occupied, and listened for another half hour to a rant of miserable, low, familiar jargon, that he presumed to improvise to his Maker as a prayer.  In this, however, the cottage apostle only followed the example set by every preacher throughout the Union, excepting those of the Episcopalian and Catholic congregations; THEY only do not deem themselves privileged to address the Deity in strains of crude and unweighed importunity.  These ranters may sometimes be very much in earnest, but surely the least we can say of it is, that they

    “Praise their God amiss.”

I enquired afterwards of a friend, well acquainted with such matters, how the grim preacher of “Hope” got paid for his labours, and he told me that the trade was an excellent one, for that many a gude wife bestowed more than a tithe of what her gude man trusted to her keeping, in rewarding the zeal of these self-chosen apostles.  These sable ministers walk from house to house, or if the distance be considerable, ride