Devonshire, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of
the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a
day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I
had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and
used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the
powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun--an old muzzle-loader. Though
stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even
extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest
grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her
acquaintance she passed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I
do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of
mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended--good
housewife that she was--down to the last small office.

In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in
the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But
in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to
public worship and acquainted me with Hell. From my eighth to my twelfth
year I lived on pretty close terms with Hell, and would wake up in the
night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no
very vivid fear for myself--or if vivid it was but occasional and rare.
Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but
I had a desperate assurance that both my parents were damned, and I loved
them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what
kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result
would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of
humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless
tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it
suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood
was tormented with visions of Hell derived from the pulpit and mixed up
with two terrible visions derived from my reading--the ghost of an evil
old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, _The
Tapestried Room_, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren's
_Diary of a Late Physician_. I had happened on these horrors among the
dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.

For three or four years these companions--the vision of