In this time my parents contracted an acquaintance and intimate friendship with the Lady Springett, who being then the widow of Sir William Springett, who died in the Parliament service, was afterwards the wife of Isaac Penington, eldest son of Alderman Penington, of London. And this friendship devolving from the parents to the children, I became an early and particular playfellow to her daughter Gulielma; being admitted, as such, to ride with her in her little coach, drawn by her footman about Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I mention this in this place because the continuation of that acquaintance and friendship, having been an occasional means of my being afterwards brought to the knowledge of the blessed TRUTH, I shall have frequent cause, in the course of the following discourse, to make honourable mention of that family, to which I am under so many and great obligations. Soon after the surrender of Oxford my father returned to his estate at Crowell, which by that time he might have need enough to look after, having spent, I suppose, the greatest part of the moneys which had been left him by his grandfather in maintaining himself and his family at a high rate in London. My elder brother (for I had one brother and two sisters, all elder than myself) was, while we lived in London, boarded at a private school, in the house of one Francis Atkinson, at a place called Hadley, near Barnet, in Hertfordshire, where he had made some good proficiency in the Latin and French tongues. But after we had left the city, and were re-settled in the country, he was taken from that private school and sent to the free school at Thame, in Oxfordshire. Thither also was I sent as soon as my tender age would permit; for I was indeed but young when I went, and yet seemed younger than I was, by reason of my low and little stature. For it was held for some years a doubtful point whether I should not have proved a dwarf. But after I was arrived at the fifteenth year of my age, or thereabouts, I began to shoot up, and gave not up growing till I had attained the middle size and stature of men. At this school, which at that time was in good reputation, I profited apace, having then a natural propensity to learning; so that at the first reading over of my lesson I commonly made myself master of it; and yet, which is strange to think of, few boys in the school wore out more birch than I. For though I was never, that I remember, whipped upon the score of not having my lesson ready, or of not saying it well, yet being a little busy boy, full of spirit, of a working head and active hand, I could not easily conform myself to the grave and sober rules and, as I then thought, severe orders of the school, but was often playing one waggish prank or other among my fellow-scholars, which subjected me to correction, so that I have come under the discipline of the rod twice in a forenoon; which yet brake no bones.