It was too true, as my last interview had shown me. He was no longer the strong, steadily obstinate John Wynne of a year or two back. He was less decisive, made occasional errors in his accounts, and would sometimes commit himself to risky ventures. Then Thomas Mason, our clerk, or my aunt would interfere, and he would protest and yield, having now by habit a great respect for my aunt’s sagacity, which in fact was remarkable. I went back to my work discontented, and pulled this way and that, not clearly seeing what I ought to do; for how could I leave him as he now was? My aunt was right. Next day I heard Captain John Nixon read in the state-house yard the noble words of the declaration. Only a few hundred were there to hear it, and its vast consequences few men as yet could apprehend. Miss Norris told me not long after that she climbed on a barrow and looked over their garden wall at Fifth street and Chestnut; “and really, Mr. Wynne, there were not ten decent coats in the crowd.” But this Miss Norris was a hot Tory, and thought us all an underbred mob, as, I fear, did most of the proprietary set--the men lacking civil courage to fight on either side, and amazed that Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Reed, and Mr. Robert Morris, and the Virginia gentry, should side with demagogues like Adams and Roger Sherman. And so time ran on. I fenced, drilled, saw my companions drift away into war, and knew not how to escape. I can now look back on my dismissal from Meeting with more regret than it gave my youth. I have never seen my way to a return to Friends; yet I am still apt to be spoken of as one of the small number who constitute, with Wetherill and Owen and Clement Biddle, the society of Friends known as Free Quakers. To discuss why later I did not claim my place as one of these would lead me to speaking of spiritual affairs, and this, as I have elsewhere said, I never do willingly, nor with comfort to myself. One afternoon in September of this year I was balancing an account when my father came in and told me that Mason, our clerk, had just had a fall in the hold of one of our ships. The day after I saw him, and although his hurts were painful they hardly seemed to justify my father in his desire that now at last he should take a long rest from work.