and lace, but, for some reason of inexplicable
contrariness, she took Michael to an old Calvinistic church with a
fire-breathing vicar, a sniffling vicar's wife and a curate who
sometimes clasped Michael's head with a damp hand that always felt as if
it were still there when it had long been removed, like a cold linseed
poultice. Now at the seaside, Michael went to a beautiful church and was
so much excited by the various events that he pressed forward, peering
on tiptoe. Luckily the two ladies in front of him were so devout and
bobbed up and down so often that he was able to see most of what was
happening. How he longed to be the little boy in scarlet who carried a
sort of silver sauce-boat and helped to spoon what looked like brown
sugar into the censer. Once during a procession, Michael stepped out
into the aisle and tried to see what actually was carried in the boat.
But the boat-boy put out his tongue very quickly, as he walked piously
by, and glared at Michael very haughtily, being about the same size.

After submitting without pleasure to a farewell kiss from Mrs. Wagland,
and after enduring much shame on account of Stella's behaviour in the
crowded railway carriage, Michael came back to Carlington Road. During
the space between arrival and bed-time he was gently happy in welcoming
his toys and books, in marvelling at the quick growth of the black
kitten and in a brief conversation with Mrs. Frith and Annie; but on the
next morning which was wet with a wetness that offered no prospect of
ever being dry, he was depressed by the thought of the long time before
Christmas, by the foreboding of yellow days of fog and the fact that
to-morrow was Sunday. He had been told to sit in the dining-room in
order to be out of the way during the unpacking and, because he had been
slow in choosing which book should accompany him, he had been called Mr.
Particular and compelled to take the one book of all others that he now
felt was most impossible even to open. So Michael sat in the bay-window
and stared at the rainy street. How it rained, not ferociously as in a
summer storm, when the surface of the road was blurred with raindrops
and the water poured along the gutters, carrying twigs and paper and
orange-peel towards the drain, and when there almost seemed a chance of
a second flood, an event Michael did not fear, having made up his mind
to float on an omnibus to the top of the Albert Hall which had once
impressed him with its