Until his twentieth year he worked with a shoemaker, who was also a dealer in cattle and wool, and proved his capacity for business life. Then a crisis came, brought about by an incident meeting him as he went about his master's affairs. He had been sent on business to a fair, and had come upon two friends, one of them a relative, who tried to draw him into a bout of health-drinking. George, who had had his one glass, laid down a groat and went home in a state of great disturbance, for he knew both these men to be professors of religion. He grappled with the difficulty at once. He spent the hours of that night in pacing up and down his room, in prayer and crying out, in sitting still and reflecting. In the light of the afternoon's incidents he saw and felt for the first time the average daily life of the world about him, "how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth," all that gave meaning to life for him had no existence in their lives, even in the lives of professing Christians. He was thrown in on himself. If God was not with those who professed him, where was He? [Footnote 3: In 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.] [Footnote 4: His father, a weaver by trade, and known as "Righteous Christer," is described by Fox as a man "with a seed of God in him"; his mother, Mary Lago, as being "of the stock of the martyrs."] The labours and gropings of the night simplified before the dawn came to the single conviction that he must "forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all." There was no hesitating. He went forth at once and wandered for four years up and down the Midland counties seeking for light, for truth, for firm ground in the quicksands of disintegrating faiths, for a common principle where men seemed to pull every way at once. He sought all the "professors" of every shade and listened to all, but would associate with none, shunning those who sought him out: "I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they did not possess what they professed." He went to hear the great preachers of the day in London and elsewhere, but found no light in them. Now and again amongst obscure groups to which hope drew him one and another were struck by his sayings, and responded to him, but he shrank from their approval. The clergy of different denominations in the neighbourhood of his home, where he returned for a while in response to the disquietude of his parents, could not understand his difficulties. How should they? He was perfectly sound in every detail of the Calvinian doctrine. They could make nothing of a distress so unlike that of other pious young Puritans. Orthodox as he was, there is no sign in his outpourings of any concern for his soul, not a word of fear, nor any sense of sin, though he heartily acknowledges temptations, a divided nature, "two thirsts." He begs the priests to tell him the meaning of his troubled state--not as one doubting, but rather with the restiveness