her pent-up feelings found vent.  Describing this scene, Richenda Gurney says:  “Betsey sat in the middle and astonished us all by the great feelings she showed.  She wept most of the way home.  The next morning William Savery came to breakfast, and preached to our dear sister after breakfast, prophesying of the high and important calling she would be led into.  What she went through in her own mind I cannot say, but the results were most powerful and most evident.  From that day her love of the world and of pleasure seemed gone.”

Her own account of the impressions made upon her reads just a little quaintly, possibly because of the unfamiliar Quaker phraseology.  “To-day I have felt that there is a God! I have been devotional, and my mind has been led away from the follies that it is mostly wrapped up in.  We had much serious conversation; in short, what he said, and what I felt, was like a refreshing shower falling upon earth that had been dried for ages.  It has not made me unhappy; I have felt ever since humble.  I have longed for virtue:  I hope to be truly virtuous; to let sophistry fly from my mind; not to be enthusiastic and foolish but only to be so far religious as will lead to virtue.  There seems nothing so little understood as religion.”

Good resolutions followed, and determined amendment of life, as far as she conceived this amendment to be in accordance with the Bible.  While in this awakened state of mind, a journey to London was projected.  Mr. Gurney took her to the metropolis and left her in charge of a trustworthy attendant, in order that she might make full trial of “the world” which she would have to renounce so fully if she embraced plain Quakerism.  Among the good resolutions made in view of this journey to London, we find that she determined not to be vain or silly, to be independent of the opinion of others, not to make dress a study, and to read the Bible at all available opportunities.  It was perhaps wise in her father to permit this reasoning, philosophical daughter of his to see the gayeties of London life before coming to a final decision respecting taking up the cross of plain Quakerism; but had her mind been less finely balanced, her judgment less trained, and her principles less formed, the result might have been disastrous.

She went, and mingled somewhat freely with the popular life of the great city.  She was taken to Drury Lane, the Covent Garden theatres, and to other places of amusement, but she could not “like plays.”  She saw some good actors; witnessed “Hamlet,” “Bluebeard,” and other dramas, but confesses that she “cannot like or enjoy them”; they seemed “so artificial.”  Then she somewhat oddly says that when her hair was dressed “she felt like a monkey,” and finally concluded that “London was not the place for heartful pleasure.”  With her natural, sound common sense, her discernment, her intelligence and purity of mind, these amusements seemed far below the level of those fitted to satisfy a rational being—­so far that she almost looked down on them with contempt.  The truth was, that having tasted a little of the purer joy of religion, all other substitutes were stale and flat, and this although she scarcely knew enough of the matter to be able correctly to analyze her own feelings.