This was Church Street,
which contained the church and the parsonage. It also had in it four
red brick houses, each surrounded with large gardens. In one lived a
brewer who had a brewery in Cowfold, and owned a dozen beer-shops in
the neighbourhood; another was a seminary for young ladies; in the
third lived the doctor; and in the fourth old Mr. and Mrs. Muston,
who had no children, had been there for fifty years; and this, so far
as Cowfold was aware, was all their history. Mr. and Mrs. Muston and
the seminary were the main strength of the church. To be sure the
doctor and the landlord of the "Angel" professed devotion to the
Establishment, but they were never inside the church, except just now
and then, and were charitably excused because of their peculiar
calling. The rest of Cowfold was Dissenting or "went nowhere."
There were three chapels; one the chapel, orthodox, Independent,
holding about seven hundred persons, and more particularly to be
described presently; the second Wesleyan, new, stuccoed, with grained
doors and cast-iron railing; the third, strict Baptist, ultra-
Calvinistic, Antinomian according to the other sects, dark, down an
alley, mean, surrounded by a small long-grassed graveyard, and named
ZOAR in large letters over the long window in front.
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