Once again did the anxious sisters see Betsy emerge from the house, with more faltering steps this time, but still inwardly praying, and slowly, tremblingly, they saw her take up the watch, and the deed was done.

She never afterwards regretted it, though it was a bitter pang to her when she collected her eighty-six children in the garden at Earlham and bade them farewell, and though she wrote in her journal as a bride, 'I cried heartily on leaving Norwich; the very stones in the street were dear to me.' In 1803--the year of Borrow's birth--John Gurney became a partner in the great London Bank of Overend and Gurney, and his son, Joseph John, in that same year went up to Oxford.

In 1809 Joseph returned to take his place in the bank, and to preside over the family of unmarried sisters at Earlham, father and mother being dead, and many members of the family distributed.

Incidentally, we are told by Mr.Hare that the Gurneys of Earlham at this time drove out with four black horses, and that when Bishop Bathurst, Stanley's predecessor, required horses for State occasions to drive him to the cathedral, he borrowed these, and the more modest episcopal horses took the Quaker family to their meeting-house.
It does not come within the scope of this book, discursive as I choose to make it, to trace the fortunes of these eleven remarkable Gurney children, or even of Borrow's momentary acquaintance, Joseph John Gurney.

His residence at Earlham, and his life of philanthropy, are a romance in a way, although one wonders whether if the name of Gurney had not been associated with so much of virtue and goodness the crash that came long after Joseph John Gurney's death would have been quite so full of affliction for a vast multitude.