letters of the alphabet as they are used in printing.

But we had two half-holidays in the week, which seem to me now to have been the happiest part of my life.  A river ran through the town, and on summer Wednesdays and Saturdays we wandered along its banks for miles, alternately fishing and bathing.  I remember whole afternoons in June, July, and August, passed half-naked or altogether naked in the solitary meadows and in the water; I remember the tumbling weir with the deep pool at the bottom in which we dived; I remember, too, the place where we used to swim across the river with our clothes on our heads, because there was no bridge near, and the frequent disaster of a slip of the braces in the middle of the water, so that shirt, jacket, and trousers were soaked, and we had to lie on the grass in the broiling sun without a rag on us till everything was dry again.

In winter our joys were of a different kind but none the less delightful.  If it was a frost, we had skating; not like skating on a London pond, but over long reaches, and if the locks had not intervened, we might have gone a day’s journey on the ice without a stoppage.  If there was no ice, we had football, and what was still better, we could get up a steeplechase—on foot straight across hedge and ditch.

In after-years, when I lived in London, I came to know children who went to school in Gower Street, and travelled backwards and forwards by omnibus—children who had no other recreation than an occasional visit to the Zoological Gardens, or a somewhat sombre walk up to Hampstead to see their aunt; and I have often regretted that they never had any experience of those perfect poetic pleasures which the boy enjoys whose childhood is spent in the country, and whose home is there.  A country boarding-school is something altogether different.

On the Sundays, however, the compensation came.  It was a season of unmixed gloom.  My father and mother were rigid Calvinistic Independents, and on that day no newspaper nor any book more secular than the Evangelical Magazine was tolerated.  Every preparation for the Sabbath had been made on the Saturday, to avoid as much as possible any work.  The meat was cooked beforehand, so that we never had a hot dinner even in the coldest weather; the only thing hot which was permitted was a boiled suet pudding, which cooked itself while we were at chapel, and some potatoes which were prepared after we came home.  Not a letter was opened unless it was clearly evident that it was not on business, and for opening these an apology was always offered that it was possible they might contain some announcement of sickness.  If on cursory inspection they appeared to be ordinary letters, although they might be from relations or friends, they were put away.

After family prayer and breakfast the business of the day began with the Sunday-school at nine o’clock.  We were taught our Catechism and Bible there till a quarter past ten.  We were then marched across the road into the chapel, a large old-fashioned building dating from the time of Charles II.  The floor was covered with high pews.  The roof was supported by three or four tall wooden pillars which ran from the ground to the ceiling, and the galleries by shorter pillars.  There was a large oak pulpit on one side against the wall, and down below, immediately under the minister, was the “singing pew,” where the singers and musicians sat, the musicians being performers on the clarionet, flute, violin, and violoncello.  Right in front was a long enclosure, called the communion pew, which was usually occupied by a number of the poorer members of the congregation.

There were three services every Sunday, besides intermitting prayer-meetings, but these I did not as yet attend.  Each service consisted of a hymn, reading the Bible, another hymn, a prayer, the sermon, a third hymn, and a short final prayer.  The reading of the Bible was unaccompanied with any observations or explanations, and I do not remember that I ever once heard a mistranslation corrected.

The first, or long prayer, as it was called, was a horrible hypocrisy, and it was a sore tax on the preacher to get through it.  Anything more totally unlike the model recommended to us in the New Testament cannot well be imagined.  It generally began with a confession that we were all sinners, but no individual sins were ever confessed, and then ensued a kind of dialogue with God, very much resembling the speeches which in later years I have heard in the House of Commons from the movers and seconders of addresses to the Crown at the opening of Parliament.

In all the religion of that day nothing was falser than the long prayer.  Direct appeal to God can only be justified when it is passionate.  To come maundering into His presence when we have nothing particular to say is an insult, upon which we should never presume if we had a petition to offer to any earthly personage.  We should not venture to take up His time with commonplaces or platitudes; but our minister seemed to consider that the Almighty, who had the universe to govern, had more leisure at His command that the idlest lounger at a club.  Nobody ever listened to this performance.  I was a good child on the whole, but I am sure I did not; and if the chapel were now in existence, there might be traced on the flap of the pew in which we sat many curious designs due to these dreary performances.

The sermon was not much better.  It generally consisted of a text, which was a mere peg for a discourse, that was pretty much the same from January to December.  The minister invariably began with the fall of man; propounded the scheme of redemption, and ended by depicting in the morning the blessedness of the saints, and in the evening the doom of the lost.  There was a tradition that in the morning there should be “experience”—that is to say, comfort for the elect, and that the evening should be appropriated to their less fortunate brethren.

The evening service was the most trying to me of all these.  I never could keep awake, and knew that to sleep under the Gospel was a sin.  The chapel was lighted in winter by immense chandeliers with tiers of candles all round.  These required perpetual snuffing, and I can see the old man going round the chandeliers in the middle of the service with a mighty pair of snuffers which opened and shut with a loud click.  How I envied him because he had semi-secular occupation which prevented that terrible drowsiness!  How I envied the pew-opener, who was allowed to stand at the vestry door, and could slip into the vestry every now and then, or even into the burial-ground if he heard irreverent boys playing there!  The atmosphere of the chapel on hot nights was most foul, and this added to my discomfort.  Oftentimes in winter, when no doors or windows were open, I have seen the glass panes streaming with wet inside, and women carried out fainting.

On rare occasions I was allowed to go with my father when he went into the villages to preach.  As a deacon he was also a lay-preacher, and I had the ride in the gig out and home, and tea at a farm-house.

Perhaps I shall not have a better opportunity to say that, with all these drawbacks, my religious education did confer upon me some positive advantages.  The first was a rigid regard for truthfulness.  My parents never would endure a lie or the least equivocation.  The second was purity of life, and I look upon this as a simply incalculable gain.  Impurity was not an excusable weakness in the society in which I lived; it was a sin for which dreadful punishment was reserved.  The reason for my virtue may have been a wrong reason, but, anyhow, I was saved, and being saved, much more was saved than health and peace of mind.

To this day I do not know where to find a weapon strong enough to subdue the tendency to impurity in young men; and although I cannot tell them what I do not believe, I hanker sometimes after the old prohibitions and penalties.  Physiological penalties are too remote,