'Ye will never get there, James,' the neighbours cried when he unfolded his plans. 'To go afoot to Carlisle! Did any one ever hear the like? It would be a wild-goose chase, even if a man hoped to come to speak with a King in his palace at the end of it; but for _thee_ to go such a journey in order to speak but for a few moments with a man thou dost not know, and in prison, it is nothing but a daft notion! What ails thee, boy?' The only answer James gave was to knit his brows more firmly together, and to mutter resolutely to himself, as he gathered his few belongings into a bundle, 'I must and I will see George Fox!' George Fox! The secret was out. That was the explanation of this fantastic journey. George Fox, after gathering a 'great people' up in the North, was now himself kept a close prisoner in Carlisle Gaol: yet he was the magnet attracting this lad, frail of body but determined of will, to travel right across England for the hope of speaking with him in his prison cell. * * * * * Let us look back a little and see how this befell. In the stately old church of Saint Swithin at East Retford a record shows that 'James, son of Thomas Parnell and Sarah his wife, was baptized there on the sixth day of September 1636.' James' parents were pious church people. It must have been a proud and thankful day for them when they took their baby son to be christened in the beautiful old font in that church, where their elder daughter, Sarah, had received her name a few years before. On the font may still be seen the figure of Saint Swithin himself, the patron Saint of the church. This gentle saint, whose dying wish had been that he might be buried in no stately building of stone but 'where his grave might be trod by human feet and watered with the raindrops of heaven,' was the guardian the parents chose for their little lad. All through his short life the boy seems to have shared this love of Nature and of the open air. James' parents were well-to-do people, and wisely determined to give their only son a good education. They sent him, therefore, as soon as he was old enough, to the Retford Grammar School, to be 'trained up in the Schools of Literature.' James tells us that he was 'as wild as others during the time he was at school, and that he was perfect in sin and iniquity as any in the town where he lived, yea and exceeded many in the wickedness of his life,' until something or other happened to sober the wild boy. He does not say what it was. Perhaps it may have been the news that reached Retford during his school days, that the King of England had been executed at Whitehall, one cold January morning. Or it may have been something quite different. Anyhow, before he left school, he was already anxious and troubled about his soul.