"When the anxious ones were asked to come up to the penitent form he was the first that came. I was sitting up with the babe in my arms; I dared not go to bed for fear he should come and pull me out by the hair of my head, as he had often done before; but the Lord bless thee. He came in when there was just an inch of candle in the socket, and said, 'Where are the children?'

"Gone to bed,' I answered.

"Bring them down.'

"I had no cradle, so I had to lay the babe on the hearthstone while I went up stairs. Now, I thought, I shall have to be turned out, and take shelter under a hedge, or a cart, or some such place. I knelt down by the bed of straw, and asked the Lord to protect me and my children. Then I took them down stairs, and to my astonishment my husband took up the eldest in his arms and kissed her, and said,

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My dear lass, the Lord have sent thee a father home to-night.' Then he took the second and said the same. And then the third, and said, 'My dear boy, the Lord have sent thee a father home to-night.' He caught up the babe and said, 'My dear babe, the Lord have sent thee a father home to-night.'

Then he put his arm round my neck and kissed me, and said, 'My dear lass, the Lord have sent thee a husband home to-night.' The Lord bless thee.

"O, Mr. Weaver, what a word! 'My dear wife.' I had na heard such words for fourteen years. He prayed and the Lord gave him peace, and He restored my soul, for in my trouble I had not been living closely to Him. O, Mr. Weaver, the Lord bless thee."

When he got up next morning Richard found the man with his four children there with open arms to welcome him, and, to thank him for the blessing they had received through his word.

CHAPTER VI.

MR. RADCLIFFE now proposed to Weaver to visit Prescot, to assist a fellow-laborer who had recently gone to that place as town missionary. Arrived at Prescot, he found the brother whom he had come to help, in a house holding a prayer-meeting. Weaver proposed that they should go out of doors and he would preach. A crowd collected, and the word was with power. He remained at Prescot three weeks, preaching frequently, and more than four hundred, among whom were some of the worst men in the town, professed to find peace in believing.

Leaving Prescot he went to Liverpool Races, where the following incident occurred. A fellow-Christian was talking to a wicked man, and Weaver, seeing that the latter was going to strike his brother, and fearing lest he should strike again, joined them, and spoke kindly to the man, who said he would strike him if he didn't take himself off.

"Well, do it," said Richard.

He struck him, and the other cheek was presented; but the man would not strike a

second time. Weaver knelt down and prayed for him, and when he rose the other wanted to give him half-a-crown, which he refused. But the man stood by him after that, and protected him from others who would have molested him. Some months afterward he was in Liverpool again, and a stranger came up, asking if he were not the man who preached at Liverpool Races, and if he remembered a man striking him there. "I'm the man," he said, "that struck you, and I have often wanted to see you to ask your forgiveness.' The prayer offered up on the race-course at Liverpool had never been forgotten till it led to the conversion of his soul.

Our next notice of Weaver is at Prescot Fair, where he established himself in the midst of the traveling theaters, boxing saloons, swinging boats, and other of the follies usual at such places. With others like-minded with himself he struck up the hymn,

"Come, ye that love the Lord,

And let your joys be known;
Join in a song with sweet accord,

And thus surround the throne."

The showmen's bells were ringing, drums beating, cymbals clapping, rattles rattling,

against them, and for an hour and a half the contest went on, during which a band of music came to the rescue, to drown the singers' voices. But all in vain. The singing was heard above the noise at a village a mile off. They sang it down, and ever since that tune is known there as "The Prescot Fair Tune." The boxing-men raved at them and the showmen cursed, but they could get no one to go into their places; and the principal show went out of the town next morning, the proprietor leaving something in pawn to pay his way, and declaring that whereas he had taken ten pounds the year before, he had not now taken as many shillings, all through that preacher. His little child said, "Father, where are we going? to Newton Races ? "

"I don't know where to go," replied the father.

"It's no use of us going to Newton Races," said the child, "for the preacher is going there, and we shall take nothing."

At night a gentleman had the town-hall opened for preaching. Crowds came in from the streets, and many professed to have obtained the pardon of their sins. Weaver afterward preached in a field, and forty-four