But, during all that period,' Stephen continues, 'we had no intercourse with any of the members of the religious Society of Friends.' These Friends still took no notice of the two strangers. They seem to have been Friends only in name. About this time bad news came from France. 'My dear mother wrote to me that the granaries we had at our country seat had been secured by the revolutionary party, as well as every article of food in our town house. My mother and my younger brother were only allowed the scanty pittance of a peck of mouldy horse-beans per week. My dear father was shut up in prison, with an equally scanty allowance. But it was before I was acquainted with the sufferings of my beloved parents, that the consideration of the general scarcity prevailing in the country led me to think how wrong it was for me to wear powder on my head, the ground of which I knew to be pride.' He gave up powder from this time. It would not be much of a sacrifice nowadays, but it was a very real one then, when powder was supposed to be the distinguishing mark of a gentleman. The two brothers were now obliged to learn to support themselves. All their estates in France had been seized. 'Our means began to be low, and yet our feelings for the sufferings in which our beloved parents might be involved, caused us to forget ourselves, strangers in a strange country, and to forward them a few hundred dollars we had yet left.' It was no easy matter to find employment. The brothers went on to New York, and there at last the Friends were kind: Friends in deed and not in name only. They found a situation for Joseph in New York itself, and arranged for Stephen to go to Philadelphia, where he was more likely to find work. And at Philadelphia the Friends were, if possible, even kinder to him than the Friends at New York. They were spiritual fathers and mothers to him, he says, and seemed to know exactly what he was feeling. 'They had but little to say in words, but I often felt that my spirit was refreshed and strengthened in their company.' At Philadelphia, he had many offers of tempting employment, but he decided to continue as a teacher of languages in a school. He gave his whole mind to his school work while he was at it, and out of school hours wandered about entirely care free. But although he was a teacher of languages and although the English of his Journals is scrupulously careful, it has often a slight foreign stiffness and formality. He was often afraid in his early years of making mistakes and not speaking quite correctly. There is a story that long afterwards, when he was in England and was taking his leave of some schoolgirls, he wished to say to them that he hoped they might be preserved safely. But in the agitation of his departure he chose the wrong words. His parting injunction, therefore, never faded from the girls' memory: 'My dear young Friends, may the Lord _pickle_ you, His dear little _muttons_.'