Front Matter

About This Book

There was once a child who spent many happy hours in a beautiful garden. She loved to play among the flowers, to stand on tiptoe and look up at the stately white lilies, or bend down to search among the fragrant leaves for sweet-scented violets. Such rare and exquisite flowers blossomed all around her, that it was difficult to decide which was the fairest, and the child used to fancy as she passed along that each one whispered to her "choose me." But she would only shake her head and hurry on, until she reached her own little plot of flowers in a corner of the garden. It was not so sunny or so gay, perhaps, as some of the other flower-beds, but it belonged to her, and that made it beautiful in her eyes.

"It is you I love best, dear flowers," she would say, bending down lovingly over the velvet pansies and sweet pinks, "because you are my very own, and grow in my very own garden."

It is with us, as with that child. We walk through God's garden and look at the fair flowers we call His saints. Although they are all most fair and we love them all, yet we have a special love for those that have lived in our own dear land, because they seem to belong more particularly to ourselves. The saints of every land belong to God; but as He has given us our island home, so we feel that the island saints are our special possession, and like the child we say, "We love you best, dear saints, because you are our very own."