Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SCHOOL AND COLLEGE (1655-1661). Admiral Penn's arrest (September 20, 1655) threw his family affairs into confusion. Margaret was at Wanstead with the younger children, Peg and Richard. William was at school in Chigwell. Uncle George had just arrived with proofs of his great losses by the Inquisition : twelve thousand pounds, besides his house, his business, and his wife. He was expecting Admiral Penn to aid him with the Lord Protector, but instead of finding his famous brother powerful at Whitehall, he found him fretting in a dungeon of the Tower. Margaret fetched her son William to Wanstead, where he fell into a low and feverish state of mind. One day a sort of vision came to him. Sitting in his room he was surprised by a strange feeling in his heart, and by as strange a radiance in his chamber. What it was that filled his veins and flashed into his eyes he could not tell. He was not yet eleven years old. But as he sat alone, in wretched mood, and in a darkish room, he felt a joyous rush of blood along his veins, and saw his chamber fillwith what he called a soft and holy light. It was a vision and a visitation. What it meant he could not say; but that he felt the sudden joy and saw the sacred light, he knew and held so long as he could know and hold by any incident of his early life. The Admiral made every effort to procure his freedom. He was soon aware that he must pay a heavy price for his enlargement. He must crave a pardon from the Lord Protector; he must formally confess his faults; he must surrender his commission as General of the Fleet; he must quit the service of his country. Nor were these conditions all. He was to live in future at his Irish house, near Cork, and was to have no share in the great distribution of Jamaica lands. Unable to do be...