privilege which he enjoyed, of the familiar friendship and confidence of
Milton. But they could not last. His amiable host, Isaac Pennington,
a blameless and quiet country gentleman, was dragged from his house by a
military force, and lodged in Aylesbury jail; his wife and family
forcibly ejected from their pleasant home, which was seized upon by the
government as security for the fines imposed upon its owner. The plague
was in the village of Aylesbury, and in the very prison itself; but the
noble-hearted Mary Pennington followed her husband, sharing with him the
dark peril. Poor Ellwood, while attending a monthly meeting at Hedgerly,
with six others, (among them one Morgan Watkins, a poor old Welshman,
who, painfully endeavoring to utter his testimony in his own dialect, was
suspected by the Dogberry of a justice of being a Jesuit trolling over
his Latin,) was arrested, and committed to Wiccomb House of Correction.

This was a time of severe trial for the sect with which Ellwood had
connected himself. In the very midst of the pestilence, when thousands
perished weekly in London, fifty-four Quakers were marched through the
almost deserted streets, and placed on board a ship, for the purpose of
being conveyed, according to their sentence of banishment, to the West
Indies. The ship lay for a long time, with many others similarly
situated, a helpless prey to the pestilence. Through that terrible
autumn, the prisoners sat waiting for the summons of the ghastly
Destroyer; and, from their floating dungeon.

"Heard the groan
Of agonizing ships from shore to shore;
Heard nightly plunged beneath the sullen wave
The frequent corse."

When the vessel at length set sail, of the fifty-four who went on board,