ds' Meetings
in Long Island, but they were held for the most part in complete
silence, and sad to say not one of the Friends ever spoke to him
afterwards. He missed their friendliness all the more because the
people he was lodging with could not bear his attending Quaker
Meetings, and tried to make him give up going to such unfashionable
assemblies. His brother, Joseph, also could not understand what had
come to him, and both Joseph and the lodging-house people teased poor
Stephen about his Quaker leanings, till he, who had been brave enough
when his life was in danger, was a coward before their mockery. He did
not want to give up going to his dear Meeting, but he hated to be
ridiculed. At first he tried to give up Meeting, but this disobedience
gave him, he says, 'a feeling of misery.' When the next Sunday came he
tried another plan. He went to the Meeting-house by roundabout ways
'through fields and over fences, ashamed to be seen by any one on the
road.' When he reached the Meeting-house by these by-lanes, the door
was closed. No Meeting was to be held there that day. The Friends
happened to have gone to another place. Stephen, therefore, sat down,
'in a retired place and in a very tried state,' to think the whole
question over again, with much humility. He decided that henceforth,
come what might, he would not be a coward; and he kept his resolution.
The next Sunday he went to Meeting 'though it rained hard and I had
about three miles to walk.' Henceforward he attended Meeting
regularly, and at last his brother ceased reproaching him for his
Quakerism, and one Sunday he actually came to Meeting too. This time
Joseph also enjoyed the silence and followed the worship. 'From that
time he attended meetings diligently, and was a great comfort to me.
But, during all that period,' Stephen continues, 'we had no
intercourse with any of the members of the religious Society of
Friends.' These Friends still took no notice of the two strangers.
They seem to have been Friends only in name.

About this time bad news came from France. 'My dear mother wrote to me
that the granaries we had at our country seat had been secured by the
revolutionary party, as well as every article of food in our town
house. My mother and my younger brother were only allowed the scanty
pittance of a peck of mouldy horse-beans per week. My dear father was
shut up in prison, with an equally scanty allowance. But it was before
I was acquainted with the suf