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.
Ever-changing flowers? Yes; because the changing of the seasons is more marked there than at other places. For Come-to-Good lies so many miles from any town, the tide of life has ebbed away so far from this quiet pool, that, for a long time past, Meetings have only been held here four times in the year. Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring,—each season brings its own Sunday. Then, and for a week or two beforehand, the topmost bar of every wooden gate in the neighbourhood bears a modest piece of white paper announcing that 'a Friends' Meeting will be held at Come-to-Good on the following First Day morning, at eleven o'clock, when the company of any who are inclined to attend will be acceptable.'
August Sunday brings deep, red roses tossing themselves up, like a crimson fountain, against the grey thatched roof. November Sunday has its own treasures: sweet, late blackberries, crimson and golden leaves, perhaps even a few late hazel nuts and acorns still hiding down in the wood. In February, the first gummy stars of the celandine are to be seen peeping out from under the hedge, while a demure little procession of white and green snowdrops walks primly up the narrow path to Meeting. The 'Fair Maids of February' seem to have an especial love for this quiet spot.
But in May—ah! May is the best Sunday of all. In May not only is the whole valley knee-deep in grass and ferns and flowers and bluebells. There is something still better! In May the burial-ground is all singing and tinkling silently with fairy spires of columbines. Garden flowers in most other places, they are quite wild here. Purple and deep-blue and pale-pink columbines are growing up everywhere; each flower with its own little pairs of twin turtle-doves hidden away inside. Even white columbine, rarest of all, has been found in that magic valley. I am afraid Lois thought longingly, all through the silence on a May Sunday, 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?