_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 of service being used._ _Is our simple Quaker way of worship really worth the price they paid for it? Or is it merely a quaint and interesting relic of a by-gone age, something like the 'Friend's bonnet' that Lois' Grandmother wore as a matter of course, which now is never used, but lies in a drawer, carefully covered with tissue paper and fragrant with lavender?_ _Is our Quaker faith like that? Is it something antiquated and interesting, but of no real use to us or to anybody to-day? Or did these 'Quaker Saints' of whom we have heard, did they, and many other brave men and women, whose stories are not written here, really and truly make a big discovery? Did they, by their living and by their dying, remind the world of a truth that it had been in danger of forgetting? a truth that may still be in danger of being forgotten if quite ordinary, everyday people are not faithful now in their turn?_ [Illustration: A FRIENDS' MEETING]