How Mrs. Benson managed it, there is no record. Perhaps she hardly knew herself! But she was not a woman to be easily turned aside from her purpose, and her husband, Colonel Gervase Benson, had been one of the 'considerable people' in the County before he had turned Quaker and 'downed those things.' Even after the change, it may be that prison doors were more easily unlocked by certain little golden and silver keys in those days, than they are in our own. Anyway, somehow or other, the interview was arranged. 'Little James' found his desire fulfilled at last. When he passed into the stifling, crowded prison den, where human beings were herded together like beasts, he never heeded the horrible stench or the crawling vermin that abounded everywhere. Rather, he felt as if he were entering the palace of a king. He paid no attention to the crowd of savage figures all around him. He saw nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing, until at last he found that his hand was lying in the grasp of a stronger, firmer hand, that held it, and would not let it go. Then, indeed, for the first time he looked up, and knew that his long journey was ended, as he met the penetrating gaze of George Fox. 'Keep thine eyes off me, they pierce me,' the Baptist Deacon had cried, a few weeks before, in that same city. As James looked up, he too felt for the first time the piercing power of those eyes, but to him it brought no terror, only joy, as he yielded himself wholly to his teacher's scrutiny. In silence the two stood, reading each the other's soul. James felt, instinctively, that his new friend knew and understood everything that had happened to him, all his life long; that there was no need to tell him anything, or to explain anything. Of an older friendship between two men it was written, 'Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.' Thus it proved once more in that crowded dungeon. No details remain of the interview; no record of what James said, or what George said. No one else could have reported what passed between them, and, though each of them has left a mention of their first meeting, the silence remains unbroken. The Journal says merely: 'While I was in ye dungeon at Carlisle, a little boy, one James Parnell, about fifteen years old, came to me, and he was convinced and came to be a very fine minister and turned many to Christ.' The boy's own account is shorter still. He does not even mention George Fox by name. 'I was called for,' he says, 'to visit some friends in the North part of England, with whom I had union before I saw their faces, and afterwards I returned to my outward dwelling-place.' His 'outward dwelling-place': the lad's frail body might tramp back along the weary miles to Retford; his spirit remained in the North, freely imprisoned with his friend.