A Book of Quaker SaintsHodgkin, L. V. (Lucy Violet)
Religion
A Book of Quaker Saints
Hodgkin, L. V. (Lucy Violet)
Society of Friends
She felt like a
little white pigeon, high up on a perch, able to see over the heads of
all the people below, and able even to look down on the grave faces of
the Ministers opposite. The row of broad-brimmed hats and coal-scuttle
bonnets looked entirely different and much more attractive, seen from
above, than when she looked up at them in Meeting at home. Then, when
some one rose to speak, Lois liked to watch the ripple that passed
over the heads beneath her, as all the faces turned towards the
speaker. Or when everybody, moved by the same impulse, stood up during
a prayer or sat down at its close, it was as fascinating to watch them
gently rise and gently sit down again as it was to watch the wind
sweep over the sea, curling it up into waves or wavelets, or the
breeze rippling over a broad field of blue-green June barley. Lois
never remembered the time when she was too small to enjoy those two
sights. 'I do like watching something I can't see, moving something I
can!' she used to think. To watch a Meeting, from the loft at
Come-to-Good, was rather like that, she felt; though years had to pass
before she found out the reason why._
_Out of doors, when the quiet hour of worship was over, other delights
were waiting. The small old white Meeting-house is surrounded by a yet
older, small green burial-ground, where long grasses, and flowers
innumerable, cover the gentle slopes. The soft mounds cluster closely
around the walls; as if those who were laid there had wished that
their bodies might rest as near as possible to the house of peace
where their spirits had rested while on earth._
_Further off the mounds are fewer; the grassy spaces between them grow
wider; till it becomes difficult to tell which are graves and which
are just grassy hillocks. Further still, the old burial-ground dips
down, and loses itself entirely, and becomes first a wood, then
frankly an orchard that fills up the bottom of the valley, through
which a clear brown stream goes wandering._
_Yet, midway on the hilly slope above, half hidden gravestones can
still be discerned, among the grass and flowers; shining through them,
like a smile that was once a sorrow. Small, grey, perfectly plain
stones they are, all exactly alike, as is the custom in Friends'
graveyards, where to be allowed a headstone at all, was, at one time,
considered 'rather gay'! Each stone bears nothing but a name upon it
and sometimes a date. 'Honor Magor' is the name carved on one of the
oldest stooping stones, and under it a date nearly 100 years old. That
is all. Lois used to wonder who Honor Magor was,--an old woman? a
young one? or possibly even a little girl? Where did she live when she
was alive? how did she come to be buried there? But there are no
answers to any of these questions; and there is no need to know more
than that the tired body of Honor Magor has been resting peacefully
for nearly a century, hidden under the tangle of waving grasses and
ever-changing flowers at Come-to-Good._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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