ing herself cosily down into the hay, 'Now I will
try to listen for comfort too.'

A few moments later the silence was broken by a half-whispered prayer
from a dark corner of the granary, 'Our dear, dear parents! help them
to be brave and faithful, and make us all brave and faithful too.'

None of the boys and girls looked round to see who had spoken, for
the words seemed to come from the deepest place in their own hearts.

Swiftly and speedily the children's prayer was answered. Help was
given to them, but they needed every scrap of their courage and faith
during the next half-hour. Almost before the last words of the prayer
died away, a loud noise was heard and the tramp of heavy feet coming
round the granary wall. The officers of the law were upon them: 'What,
yet another conventicle of these pestilential heretics to be broken
up?' shouted a wrathful voice. The next moment the door was roughly
burst open, and in the doorway appeared a much dreaded figure, no less
a person than Sir William Armorer himself, Justice of the Peace and
Equerry to the King. None of the children had any very clear idea as
to the meaning of that word 'equerry'; therefore it always filled them
with a vague terror of unknown possibilities. In after years, whenever
they heard it they saw again an angry man with a florid face, dressed
in a suit of apple-green satin slashed with gold, standing in a
doorway and wrathfully shaking a loaded cane over their heads.

'Yet more of ye itching to be laid by the ears in gaol!' shouted this
apparition as he entered and slammed the heavy wooden door behind him.
But an expression of amazement followed when he was once inside the
room.

'Brats! By my life! Quaker brats! and none beside them!' he exclaimed
astonished, as he looked round the band of children. 'Quaker brats
holding a conventicle of their own, as if they were grown men and
women! Having stopped the earth and gaoled the fox, must we now deal
with the litter? Look you here, do you want a closer acquaintance
with this?'

With these words, he pointed his loaded stick at each of the children
in turn and drew out a sharp iron point concealed in one end of it,
and began to slash the air. Then, changing his mind again, he went
back to the door and called out to his followers in the passage
outside, 'Here, men, we will let the maidens go, but you must teach
these lads what it is to disobey the law, or I'm no Justice of His
Majesty's Peace.'

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