all individual share in
those

'Old unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.'

His story has come down to us as a staunch comrade and a valiant
fighter, in a different kind of warfare. His victory was won in a
struggle in which all the visible weapons were on the other side;
when, through long years, he had only the armour of meekness and of
love wherewith to oppose hardship and violence and wrong.

Wherefore, of this fight and of this victory, his own name remains as
a symbol and a sign. Not in vain was he called at his birth 'Amor,'
which, in the Latin tongue signifies 'Love,' as all men know.

The first meeting between Captain Amor Stoddart and him who was to be
thereafter his spirit's earthly captain in the new strange warfare
that lay before him, happened on this wise.

In the year 1648, when the long Civil Wars were at last nearing their
close, George Fox visited Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and held a
meeting with the professors (that is to say the Puritans) there. It
was in that same year of 1648, when every day the shadow was drawing
nearer of the fatal scaffold that should be erected within the Palace
at Whitehall the following January. But although that shadow crept
daily nearer, men, for the most part, as yet perceived it not. Fox
himself was at this time still young, as years are counted, being only
twenty-four years of age. Four other summers were yet to pass before
that memorable day when he should climb to the summit of old Pendle
Hill, and, after seeing there the vision of a 'great people to be
gathered,' should begin himself to gather them at Firbank and
Swarthmoor and many another place.

George, though still young in years, was already possessed not only of
a strange and wonderful presence, but also of a gift to perceive and
to draw the souls of other men, and to knit them to his own.

'I went again to Mansfield,' he says in his Journal, 'where was a
Great Meeting of professors and people, where I was moved to pray; and
the Lord's power was so great that the house seemed to be shaken. When
I had done, one of the professors said, "It was now as in the days of
the Apostles, when the house was shaken where they were."'

After Fox had finished praying, with this vehemence that seemed to
shake the house, one of the professors began to pray in his turn, but
in such a dead and formal way that even the other professors were
grieved thereat and rebuked him. Whereupon this praying profe