had ever existed, never even
heard Fox's name, until long after he was grown up. If Etienne de
Grellet, the gay young nobleman of the French court, had been told
that his story would ever be written in a book of 'Quaker Saints' he
would, most likely, have raised his dark eyebrows and have looked
extremely surprised.

'_Quakere? Qu'est-ce que c'est alors, Quakere? Quel drole de mot! Je
ne suis pas Quakere, moi!_' he might have answered, with a disdainful
shrug of his high, narrow, aristocratic French shoulders. Yet here he
is after all!

* * * * *

Etienne de Grellet was born at Limoges in France, in the year 1773.
His childhood was passed in the stormy years when the cloud was
gathering that was to burst a little later in the full fury of the
French Revolution. His father, Gabriel de Grellet, a wealthy merchant
of Limoges, was a great friend and counsellor of Louis XVI. and Marie
Antoinette. As a reward for having introduced into the country the
manufacture of finer porcelain than had ever before been made in
France he was ennobled by the king, whom he often used to attend in
his private chapel. Limoges china is still celebrated all over the
world; and at that time the most celebrated of its china-makers was M.
de Grellet, the king's friend.

Naturally the sons of this successful merchant and nobleman were
brought up in great luxury. Etienne and his brothers were not sent to
a school, but had expensive tutors to teach them at home. Their
parents wanted their children to be well educated, honourable,
straightforward, generous, and kind; to possess not only
accomplishments but good qualities. Yet Etienne felt, when he looked
back in later days, that something had been left out in their
education that was, perhaps, the most important thing of all.

When he was quite a little boy he was taken to visit one of his aunts
who was a nun in a convent near Limoges. The rules of this convent
were so strict that the nuns might not even see their relations who
came to visit them. They might only speak to them from the other side
of two iron gratings, between the bars of which a thick curtain was
hung. The little boy thought it very strange to be taken from his
beautiful home, full of costly furniture, pictures, and hangings, and
to be brought into the bare convent cell. Then he looked up and saw an
iron grating, and heard a voice coming through the folds of a thick
curtain that hung behind it. He