wn and slippers; who, when he
saw me, said, 'Oh! is't you? How is Sir William?'"

That was in May. Within a week the plague came. On the 7th of June,
1665, Mr. Pepys makes this ominous entry: "This day," he says, "much
against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with
a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy,' written there; which
was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my
remembrance, I ever saw." Day by day the pestilence increased, and
presently there was no more studying at Lincoln's Inn. Young Penn went
for safety into the clean country. There, among the green fields, in the
enforced leisure, with time to think, and the most sobering things to
think about, his old seriousness returned. The change was so marked that
his father, feeling that it were well to renew the pleasant friendship
with the world which had begun in France, sent him over to Ireland.

At Dublin, the Duke of Ormond, the Lord Lieutenant, was keeping a merry
court. William entered heartily into its pleasures. He resided upon his
father's estates, at Shannagarry Castle. He so distinguished himself in
the suppression of a mutiny that Ormond offered him a commission in the
army, and William was disposed to accept it. He had his portrait
painted, clad in steel, with lace at his throat. His dark hair is parted
in the middle, and hangs in cavalier fashion over his shoulders. He
looks out of large, clear, questioning eyes; and his handsome face is
strong and serious.

But the young cavalier went one day to Cork upon some business, and
there heard that Thomas Loe was in town, and that he was to preach. Penn
went to hear him, and again the spoken word was critical and decisive.
"There is a faith," said the preacher, "which overcomes the world, and
there is a faith which is overcome by the world." Such was the theme,
and it seemed to Penn as if every word were spoken out of heaven
straight to his own soul. In the long contention which had been going on
within him between the world and the other world, the world had been
getting the mastery. The attractions of a martial life had shone more
brightly than the light which had flamed about him in his boyhood. Then
Loe spoke, and thenceforth there was no more perplexity. Penn's choice
was definitely made.

In his account of his travels in Holland and Germany, written some ten
years after this crisis, Penn recurs to it in an address from which I
have already quo