of the nosegay of columbines she meant to
gather afterwards. Directly Meeting was over, the children pelted down
very fast from the loft. Numbers of little feet flew across the sunlit
grass, while the elder Friends were walking sedately down the path to
the gate._

_'O Columbine, open your folded wrapper,
Where two twin turtle-doves dwell,'_

_chanted the children as they frolicked about, forgetting that they
had been stiff with sitting so long in Meeting, as they gathered
handfuls of their treasures._

_All too soon they would hear the call: 'Come, children! it is time to
be going.' And then they would scamper back, their hands full of their
dear dove flowers. No wonder they felt that in leaving this sunny spot
they were leaving one of the happiest places on earth. If only they
could stay there! If only some one could be enjoying it always! What a
pity that on the forty-eight other Sundays of the year it should all
be deserted, shut up and forsaken! There might be numbers of other
wonderful flowers that nobody ever saw. There the old Meeting-house
stays all by itself the whole year round, except on those four
Sundays, even as a lonely pool of clear water remains high up on the
rocks, showing that the great sea itself did come there once, long
ago, flowing in mightily, filling up all the bare chinks and
crannies._

_Will such a high tide ever come back again to Come-to-Good? Is that
tide perhaps beginning to flow in, noiselessly and steadily, even
now?_

_Some things look rather as if it might be; for new Friends'
Meeting-houses are being built in crowded cities to-day where even the
high tide of long ago never came. But then, in lonely country places
like Come-to-Good, scattered up and down all over England, there are
many of these deserted Meeting-houses, where hardly anybody comes now
or only comes out of curiosity. Yet the high tide did fill them all
once long ago, full to overflowing, when people met within their
walls constantly, seeking and finding God._

* * * * *

_The stories in this book about our 'Quaker Saints' show at what a
cost these deserted places were won for us by our brave forefathers.
They, with their health and their lives gladly given in those terrible
prisons of long ago, gained for us our liberty to meet together 'in
numbers five or more,' to practise a 'form of worship not authorised
by law'; that is to say, without any prayer-book or set form o