after the meeting was ended, and the Friends departed to their
several homes, addressing himself to Mary Penington, as the mistress
of the house, he could not enough magnify the bravery and courage of
the Friends, nor sufficiently debase himself. He told her how long
he had been a professor, what pains he had taken, what hazards he
had run, in his youthful days, to get to meetings; how, when the
ways were forelaid and passages stopped, he swam through rivers to
reach a meeting; and now, said he, that I am grown old in the
profession of religion, and have long been an instructor and
encourager of others, that I should thus shamefully fall short
myself, is matter of shame and sorrow to me.

Thus he bewailed himself to her. And when we came back he renewed
his complaints of himself to us, with high aggravations of his own
cowardice; which gave occasion to some of the Friends tenderly to
represent to him the difference between profession and possession,
form and power.

He was glad, he said, on our behalfs, that we came off so well, and
escaped imprisonment.

But when he understood that George Whitehead and I were liable to an
after-reckoning next morning, he was troubled, and wished the
morning was come and gone, that we might be gone with it.

We spent the evening in grave conversation and in religious
discourses, attributing the deliverance we hitherto had to the Lord.
And the next morning, when we were up and had eaten, we tarried some
time to see what the Justice would do further with us, and to
discharge our engagement to him; the rest of the Friends, who were