ad. Can you not see the countryman's surprised face as he turns
round and stares at the speaker, and wonders whatever he means?

'So when I came to Richard Robinson's I declared the Everlasting Truth
to him, and yet a dark jealousy rose up in him after I had gone to
bed, that I might be somebody that was come to rob his house, and he
locked all his doors fast. And the next day I went to a separate
meeting at Justice Benson's where the people generally was convinced,
and this was the place that I had seen a people coming forth in white
raiment; and a mighty meeting there was and is to this day near
Sedbarr which I gathered in the name of Jesus.'

These flax-weavers of Brigflatts were a company of 'Seekers,'
unsatisfied souls who had strayed away like lost sheep from all the
sects and Churches, and were longing for a spiritual Shepherd to come
and find them again and bring them home to the fold.

George Fox was a weaver's son himself. Directly he heard it, the whirr
of the looms beside the rushing Rawthey must have been a homelike
sound in his ears. But more than that, his spirit was immediately at
home among the little colony of weavers of snowy linen; for he
recognised at once that these were the riverside people 'in white
raiment,' whom he had seen in his vision, and to whom he had been
sent.

Not only the flax-weavers, but also some of the 'considerable people'
of the neighbourhood accepted the message of the wandering preacher,
who came to them over the dales that memorable Whitsuntide. The master
of the house where the meeting was held, Colonel Gervase Benson
himself, and his good wife Dorothy also, were 'convinced of Truth,'
and faithfully did they adhere thereafter to their new faith, through
fair weather and foul. In later years, men noted that this same
Colonel Benson, following his teacher's love of simplicity, and hatred
of high-sounding titles, generally styled himself merely a
'husbandman,' notwithstanding 'the height and glory of the world that
he had a great share of,'[4] seeing that 'he had been a Colonel, a
Justice of the Peace, Mayor of Kendal, and Commissary in the
Archdeaconry of Richmond before the late domestic wars. Yet, as an
humble servant of Christ, he downed those things.'[5] His wife,
Mistress Dorothy, also, was to prove herself a faithful friend to her
teacher in after years, when his turn, and her turn too, came to
suffer for 'Truth's sake.'

But in these opening summer days of 1652, n