when I got home I found they had
passed here in search of you. They have not yet gone back."

This was unpleasant news. Yet Penn was soon convinced that he had been
extremely fortunate in thus throwing his pursuers off his track. It was
far better that they should have gone on before him, than that they
should be following close upon his heels.

He staid with the farmer all night, and departed with him early the next
morning to pursue his journey. It was not safe for him to keep the road,
for he might at any moment meet his pursuers returning; accordingly, the
old man showed him a circuitous route along the base of the mountains,
which could be travelled only on foot, and by daylight.

"Here I leave you," said his kind old guide, when they had reached the
banks of a mountain stream. "Follow this run, and it will take you
around to the road, about a mile this side of my brother's house.
There's a bridge near which you can wait, when you get to it. If your
pursuers go back past my house, then I will harness up and drive on to
the bridge, and water my horse there. You will see me, and get in to
ride, and I will take you to my brother's, and make some arrangement for
helping you on still farther to night."

So they parted; the lonely fugitive feeling that the kindness of a few
such men, scattered like salt through the state, was enough to redeem it
from the fate of Sodom, which otherwise, by its barbarism and injustice,
it would have seemed to deserve.

Following the stream in its windings through a wilderness of thickets
and rocks, he reached the bridge about the middle of the afternoon. His
progress had been leisurely. The day was warm, bright, and tranquil. The
stream poured over ledges, or gushed among mossy stones, or tumbled down
jagged rocks in flashing cascades. Its music filled him with memories of
home, with love that swelled his heart to tears, with longings for peace
and rest. Its coolness and beauty made a little Sabbath in his soul, a
pause of holy calm, in the midst of the fear and tumult that lay before
and behind him.

During that long, solitary ramble he had pondered much the great
question which had of late agitated his mind--the question which, in
peaceful days, he had thought settled with his own conscience forever.
But days of stern experience play sad havoc with theories not founded in
experience. In all the ordinary emergencies of life Penn had found the
doctrine of non-resistance to evil, of o