All this time Woolman fought single-handed against overwhelming odds, but he was destined soon to have help from two of the most remarkable and antithetical personages connected with this early movement against slavery; namely, Benjamin Lay and Anthony Benezet.[182] Lay represented the revolutionary type of reformer. Whittier describes his personal appearance as "a figure only four and a half feet high, hunchbacked, with projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a huge head, showing only beneath his enormous white hat large, solemn eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy semicircle of beard falling low on his breast--a figure to recall the old legends of troll, brownie, and kobold."[183] By birth he was a Friend, but the Society in England disowned him on account of his revolutionary propensities. He took up residence in the West Indies, but was compelled to leave on account of his violent denunciation of slavery. He went to Philadelphia, but finding slavery there, retired to a cave, where he lived a most eccentric life, refusing to eat food or wear clothes which had been secured at the expense of animal life, or produced by slave labor. He made frequent excursions, however, from his cave to denounce slavery, his favorite subject being "Deliverance to the Captive." He usually succeeded in being heard, though he was detested by the slaveholders. On one occasion, when he interrupted a meeting in Philadelphia, he was forcibly ejected by a burly blacksmith. He remained, however, the most fearless of the earliest abolitionists. Though his methods were entirely different from Woolman's, and though, no doubt, neither reformer was influenced by the other, Lay's stubborn fight against slavery was obviously helpful to Woolman's calmer campaign against the same evil. Anthony Benezet, on the other hand, was a reformer of riper judgment and calmer methods than Lay. He has been described as "a small, eager-faced man, full of zeal and activity, constantly engaged in works of benevolence, which were by no means confined to the blacks."[184] He was a descendant of persecuted French Protestants. He, therefore, inherited an aversion to any form of persecution, and readily became a benefactor of the slave. It was inevitable that he should become a friend of Woolman, and a coadjutor in the movement to abolish slavery.[185]