hile the literature, illustrated
and otherwise, provided in those days for serious-minded youth, answered
all questionings with blunt brutality. If you did wrong you burnt in a
fiery furnace for ever and ever. Were your imagination weak you could
turn to the accompanying illustration, and see at a glance how you
yourself would writhe and shrink and scream, while cheerful devils, well
organised, were busy stoking. I had been burnt once, rather badly, in
consequence of live coals, in course of transit on a shovel, being let
fall upon me. I imagined these burning coals, not confined to a mere
part of my body, but pressing upon me everywhere, not snatched swiftly
off by loving hands, the pain assuaged by applications of soft soap and
the blue bag, but left there, eating into my flesh and veins. And this
continued for eternity. You suffered for an hour, a day, a thousand
years, and were no nearer to the end; ten thousand, a million years, and
yet, as at the very first, it was for ever, and for ever still it would
always be for ever! I suffered also from insomnia about this period.

"Then be good," replied the foolish voices round me; "never do wrong,
and so avoid this endless agony."

But it was so easy to do wrong. There were so many wrong things to do,
and the doing of them was so natural.

"Then repent," said the voices, always ready.

But how did one repent? What was repentance? Did I "hate my sin," as I
was instructed I must, or merely hate the idea of going to hell for
it? Because the latter, even my child's sense told me, was no true
repentance. Yet how could one know the difference?

Above all else there haunted me the fear of the "Unforgivable Sin." What
this was I was never able to discover. I dreaded to enquire too closely,
lest I should find I had committed it. Day and night the terror of it
clung to me.

"Believe," said the voices; "so only shall you be saved." How believe?
How know you did believe? Hours would I kneel in the dark, repeating in
a whispered scream:

"I believe, I believe. Oh, I do believe!" and then rise with white
knuckles, wondering if I really did believe.

Another question rose to trouble me. In the course of my meanderings I
had made the acquaintance of an old sailor, one of the most disreputable
specimens possible to find; and had learned to love him. Our first
meeting had been outside a confectioner's window, in the Commercial
Road, where he had discovered me standing, my nose aga