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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: REUBEN SILCOX'S WOOING. It was half a century ago, ere yet Friends in general, much less the Quakers of Shal- chester, had entirely laid aside their becoming distinctive dress. Quaker bonnets and shawls, collarless coats and broad-brims, were not yet a thing of the past. Sweet girlish faces still looked out from behind their silken fences, and boyish ones surmounted the old-fashioned stock or choker. The rush of modern life had not swept into the sleepy cathedral town of Shal- chester. Indeed, even at the present day, except for its fine railway station and the large posters on the hoardings, one might, under the shadow of the old cathedral,fancy oneself back in the lyth century, when George Fox had entered the great " steeplehouse " and denounced the clergyman as a hireling priest, an unfaithful shepherd and blind leader of the blind. Still there has been change, even in the last fifty years, and the slow-moving, cautious Quaker community shows it. The Friends of the present day have their Sunday schools, mission services and adult schools, work which in the quietism of the last century would have savoured too much of what was termed " creaturely activity." For generations they have been on excellent terms with their Christian neighbours, with whom they now work shoulder to shoulder for the reclaiming of the world. The Quakers of Shalchester were not idle either in their own Society or in the world. They had much to do in looking to the "light within," in seeing that in all things their lives correspondedwith the holy traditions which had been handed on from generation to generation. The slavery question had been settled- a battle in which Shalchester Friends had taken no small part. Most of them, however, looked upon the victory as almost worse than a defeat. The und...