The Admiral having been appointed by the Duke of York to accompany him in command of the fleet, took William as one of his staff; but after a short absence the latter was sent home with a dispatch to the King. The plague was now spreading in London, and soon the whole aspect of the city was sadly changed. The awful scenes of death that were daily occurring and struck the stoutest hearts with dismay, brought to the sensitive mind of the gay young man conviction of the uncertainty of life, and warning of the necessity to prepare for its sudden termination. The Holy Spirit again broke up his false rest, showed him the emptiness of all worldly grandeur, and wooed him to follow Christ Jesus in the regeneration. After a cruise of about two months, his father returned, flushed with success in the sanguinary contest in which he had been engaged. He found William again serious, and indisposed to continue the course upon which, but a short time before, he had exultantly entered. The increased honors and emoluments heaped on the victorious sailor by the royal brothers, made him still more fearful lest the foolish whimsies, as he thought them, of his son, would yet disappoint his hopes of the hereditary honors that might be settled upon him. Large accession to his Irish estate, derived from royal bounty as a reward for the service rendered, made it necessary that some one should look after his interest there; and having experienced the good effect, as he considered it, of placing his son within the dazzling circle of gay and fashionable life, he hurried him across the Channel, with letters of introduction to the Duke of Ormond, then Lord Deputy of Ireland. William found the vice-regal Court comparatively free from the dissipation and loose morals of that which surrounded Charles II., and he soon seemed to enter heartily into the enjoyment it afforded. He joined an expedition sent, under the command of Lord Airan, to quell an insurrection that broke out among the garrison at Carrickfergus, and for a while was so excited by the spirit and enterprise attending active military life, that he became anxious to adopt it as a profession. But his father, when consulted on the subject, decidedly objected, and it was given up. But He who watches over the workmanship of his hand, and seeks to save that which is lost, was not leaving William Penn to wander in the paths of folly, without the reproofs of instruction, and in mercy, by his witness in the heart, inclining him to accept those reproofs as the way to life; and it was not long before he was brought to a stand, and made to feel that he must then make his election between the life of a votary of this world and that of a self-denying disciple of a crucified Saviour.