Some of the happiest remembrances of my childhood are of days spent in a little Quaker colony on a high hill.
The walk was in itself a preparation, for the hill was long and steep and at the mercy of the north-east wind; but at the top, sheltered by a copse and a few tall trees, stood a small house, reached by a flagged pathway skirting one side of a bright trim garden.
I, with my seven summers of lonely, delicate childhood, felt, when I gently closed the gate behind me, that I shut myself into Peace.
The house was always somewhat dark, and there were no domestic sounds. The two old ladies, sisters, both born in the last century, sat in the cool, dim parlour, netting or sewing. Rebecca was small, with a nut-cracker nose and chin; Mary, tall and dignified, needed no velvet under the net cap. I can feel now the touch of the cool dove-coloured silk against my cheek, as I sat on the floor, watching the nimble fingers with the shuttle, and listened as Mary read aloud a letter received that morning, describing a meeting of the faithful and the 'moving of the Spirit' among them. I had a mental picture of the 'Holy Heavenly Dove,' with its wings of silvery grey, hovering over my dear old ladies;and I doubt not my vision was a true one.
Once as I watched Benjamin, the old gardener - a most 'stiff-backed Friend' despite his stoop and his seventy years - putting scarlet geraniums and yellow fever-few in the centre bed, I asked, awe-struck, whether such glowing colours were approved; and Rebecca smiled and said - "Child, dost thee not think the Lord may have His glories?" and I looked from the living robe of scarlet and gold to the dove-coloured gown, and said: "Would it be pride in thee to wear His glories?" and Mary answered for her - "The change is not yet; better beseems us the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit.
The 'change from glory to glory' has come to them both long since, but it seems to me as if their robes must still be Quaker-grey.
Upstairs was the invalid daughter and niece. For years she had been compelled to lie on her face; and in that position she had done wonderful drawings of the High Priest, the Ark of the Covenant, and other Levitical figures. She had a cageful of tame canary-birds which answered to their names and fed from her plate at meal-times. Of these I remember only Roger, a gorgeous fellow with a beautiful voice and strong will of his own, who would occasionally defy his mistress from the secure fastness of a high picture-frame, but always surrendered at last, and came to listen to his lecture with drooping wings.
A city of Peace, this little house, for the same severely-gentle decorum reigned in the kitchen as elsewhere: and now, where is such a haunt to be found?
In the earlier part of this century the Friends bore a most important witness. They were a standing rebuke to rough manners, rude speech, and to the too often mere outward show of religion.
No one could fail to be impressed by the atmosphere of peace suggested by their bearing and presence; and the gentle, sheltered, contemplative lives lived by most of them undoubtedly made them unusually responsive to spiritual influence. Now, the young birds have left the parent nest and the sober plumage and soft speech;they are as other men; and in a few short years the word Quaker will sound as strange in our ears as the older appellation Shaker does now.
This year I read for the first time the Journal of George Fox. It is hard to link the rude, turbulent son of Amos with the denizens in my city of Peace; but he had his work to do and did it, letting breezy truths into the stuffy 'steeple-houses' of the 'lumps of clay.'
