originator of Sunday-schools would be astonished were he to step into almost any of those which have branched out from his leading idea. It is still expanding; it is one of the most real and intense activities of the Universal Church; but among the immense crowds of those who, in England and America, are conducting Sunday-school classes, it is, perhaps, not too much to say, that in not one is there a more simple and earnest desire to do good than that which illuminated the life, and lends a sweet and charming interest to the memory, of Robert Raikes.

CHAPTER XI.

THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SILAS TOLD.

DR. ABEL STEVENS, in his History of Methodism, says, "I congratulate myself on the opportunity of reviving the memory of Silas Told;" and speaks of the little biography in which Silas himself records his adventures as "a record told with frank and affecting simplicity, in a style of terse and flowing English Defoe might have envied."

Such a testimony is well calculated to excite the curiosity of an interested reader, especially as the two or three incidents mentioned only serve to whet the appetite for more of the like description. The little volume to which he refers has been for some years in the possession of the author of this volume. It is indeed an astonishing book; its alleged likeness to Defoe's charmingly various style of recital of adventures by sea and by land is no exaggeration, whilst as a piece of real biography it may claim, and quite sustain, a place side by side with the romantic and adventurous career of John Newton; but the wild wonderfulness of

the story of Silas seems to leave Newton's in the shade. Like Newton, Told was also a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, and a believer in special providences; and well might he believe in such who was led certainly along as singular a path as any mortal could tread. The only other memorial besides his own which has, we believe, been penned of him-a brief recapitulation-well describes him as honest, simple, and tender. Silas Told accompanied, in that awful day, numbers of persons to the gallows, and attempted to console sufferers and victims in circumstances of most harrowing and tragic solemnity he certainly furnished comfortable help and light when no others were willing or able to sympathise or to help. John Wesley loved him, and when Silas died he buried him, and says of him in his Journal: On the 20th of December, 1778, I buried what was mortal of honest Silas Told. For many years he attended the malefactors in Newgate without fee or reward; and I suppose no man, for this hundred years, has been so successful in that melancholy office. God had given him peculiar talents for it, and he had amazing success therein; the greatest part of those whom he attended died in peace, and many of them in the triumph of faith." Such was Silas Told.

But before we come to those characteristic

circumstances to which Wesley refers, we must follow him through some of the wild scenes of his sailor life. He was born in Bristol in 1711; his parents were respectable and creditable people, but of somewhat faded families. His grandfather had been an eminent physician in Bunhill Row, London; his mother was from Exeter.

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Silas was educated in the noble foundation school of Edward Colston in Bristol. The life of this excellent philanthropist was so remarkable, and in many particulars so like his own, that we cannot wonder that he stops for some pages in his early story to recite some of the remarkable phenomena in Colston's life. Silas's childhood was singular, and the stories he tells are especially noticeable, because in after-life the turn of his character seems to have been especially real and practical. Thus he tells how, when a child, wandering with his sister in the King's Wood, near Bristol, they lost their way, and were filled with the utmost consternation, when suddenly, although no house was in view, nor, as they thought, near, a dog came up behind them, and drove them clear out of the wood into a path with which they were acquainted; especially it was remarkable that the dog never barked at them, but when they looked round about for the dog he was nowhere

to be seen. Careless children out for their own pleasure, they sauntered on their way again, and again lost their way in the wood-were again bewildered, and in greater perplexity than before, when, on a sudden looking up, they saw the same dog making towards them; they ran from him in fright, but he followed them, drove them out of the labyrinths, and did not leave them until they could not possibly lose their way again. Simple Silas says, "I then turned about to look for the dog, but saw no more of him, although we were now upon an open common. This was the Lord's doings, and marvellous in our eyes."

When he was twelve years of age, he appears to have been quite singularly influenced by the reading of the Pilgrim's Progress; and late in life, when writing his biography, he briefly, but significantly, attempts to reproduce the intense enjoyment he received-the book evidently caught and coloured his whole imagination. At this time, too, he was very nearly drowned, and while drowning, so far from having any sense of terror, he had no sense nor idea of the things of this world, but that it appeared to him he rushingly emerged out of thick darkness into what appeared to him a glorious city, lustrous and brilliant, the light of which seemed to illuminate the darkness through which he