Unabashed, Thomas Penn rose to dismiss him. “If you care to put your complaints in writing, Mr. Franklin, we will then consider them.” Those arrogant Penns! How it would have grieved their noble father to see into what selfish hands he had left his beloved Pennsylvania! Franklin had yet to find out through personal experience that nobility of character is not always inherited. Five days later he returned with the Assembly’s grievances in written form. On the advice of their lawyer, a “proud and angry man,” Ferdinand John Paris, the Penns sent Franklin’s paper to the Royal lawyers, the Attorney-General Charles Pratt, and Solicitor-General Charles Yorke. These gentlemen were out of town. There was nothing to do but wait. Franklin fell sick with a cold and fever that September and was bedridden nearly eight weeks. Dr. Fothergill, the man who had written the preface for his pamphlet on electricity, tended him regularly. Mrs. Stevenson, his landlady, nursed him like a son. Even William was unusually obliging, did his errands and helped him to prepare a letter to the _Citizen_ to counteract slanders about Pennsylvania which Franklin suspected emanated from the Penns. William was enrolling in law school in London; he had bought himself elegant clothes that rivaled those of any young English peer. As soon as he was well enough, Franklin went on a shopping spree himself. For Debby, who still liked bright colors, he purchased a crimson satin cloak and for Sally a black silk one, with a scarlet feather and muff which William selected. There were other luxuries for their home not found in America: English china, silver salt ladles, an apple corer and a gadget “to make little turnips out of great ones,” a carpet, tablecloths, napkins, silk blankets from France, and a “large fine jug for beer,” which he had fallen in love with at first sight. “I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame,” he explained the gift to Debby, “clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good-natured and lovely, and put me in mind of—somebody.” His most extravagant present followed later—a harpsichord for Sally which cost the huge sum of forty-two guineas. If some Englishmen were snobs, there were plenty of others who were just the opposite. Franklin’s fellow members of the august Royal Society welcomed him warmly. He made many new scientific friends, among them the stout and amiable John Pringle, an authority on military medicine and sanitation, and John Canton, the first Englishman to draw lightning from the sky. At Cambridge, in May 1758, he performed experiments in evaporation with John Hadley, professor of chemistry. He made a trip to Northampton, the ancestral home of the Franklins, and met some distant relatives. When he found the Franklin graves in the cemetery so moss covered that their inscriptions were effaced, he had his servant Peter scour them clean.