No wonder he was from time to time greatly cast down. His health was delicate, he lived alone, and, between deliberate fasting and unconscious neglect of himself, his body suffered and his spirits were depressed. He writes to Charles Wesley: "I preach, I exhort, I pray, etc., but as yet I seem to have cast the net on the wrong side of the ship. Lord Jesus, come Thyself and furnish me with a Divine commission! For some months past I have laboured under an insufferable drowsiness. I could sleep day and night, and the hours which I ought to employ with Christ on the mountain I spend like Peter in the garden."
The drowsiness of which he complains was probably connected with what Wesley says was his invariable rule; viz. to sit up two whole nights in a week, and devote the time to reading, meditation, and prayer. We have seen that Wesley disapproved these austerities as "well intended but not well judged." It would be easy, but ungracious, to expand into censure what Wesley so gently touched upon. It will be pleasanter to look for a moment upon the solitary vicar at his frugal meal, as portrayed by one who never forgot her girlish visit to the vicarage.
"Mr. Fletcher sometimes visited a boarding school at Madeley. One morning he came in just as the girls had sat down to breakfast. He said but little while the meal lasted, but when it was finished he spoke to each girl separately, and concluded by saying to the whole, 'I have waited some time on you this morning, that I might see you eat your breakfast; and I hope you will visit me to-morrow morning and see how I eat mine.' He told them his breakfast hour was seven o'clock, and obtained a promise that they would visit him. Next morning they went at the time appointed, and seated themselves in the kitchen. Mr. Fletcher came in, quite rejoiced to see them. On the table stood a small basin of milk and sops of bread. Mr. Fletcher took the basin across the kitchen, and sat down on an old bench. He then took out his watch, laid it before him, and said: 'My dear girls, yesterday morning I waited on you a full hour while you were at breakfast. I shall take as much time this morning in eating my breakfast as I usually do, if not rather more. Look at my watch! and he immediately began to eat and continued in conversation with them. When he had finished he asked them how long he had been at breakfast. They said, 'Just a minute and a half, sir.' 'Now, my dear girls,' said he, 'we have fifty-eight minutes of the hour left'; and he began to sing--