e soft closing of his mother's door assured him that come
what might there was only a wall between him and her.

"And perhaps she won't go to sleep before I go to sleep," he hoped.

At first Mark meditated upon bishops. The perversity of night thoughts
would not allow him to meditate upon the pictures of some child-loving
bishop like St. Nicolas, but must needs fix his contemplation upon a
certain Bishop of Bingen who was eaten by rats. Mark could not remember
why he was eaten by rats, but he could with dreadful distinctness
remember that the prelate escaped to a castle on an island in the middle
of the Rhine, and that the rats swam after him and swarmed in by every
window until his castle was--ugh!--Mark tried to banish from his mind
the picture of the wicked Bishop Hatto and the rats, millions of them,
just going to eat him up. Suppose a lot of rats came swarming up Notting
Hill and unanimously turned to the right into Notting Dale and ate him?
An earthquake would be better than that. Mark began to feel thoroughly
frightened again; he wondered if he dared call out to his mother and put
forward the theory that there actually was a rat in his room. But he had
promised her to be brave and unselfish, and . . . there was always the
evening hymn to fall back upon.

_Now the day is over,_
_Night is drawing nigh,_
_Shadows of the evening_
_Steal across the sky._

Mark thought of a beautiful evening in the country as beheld in a Summer
Number, more of an afternoon really than an evening, with trees making
shadows right across a golden field, and spotted cows in the foreground.
It was a blissful and completely soothing picture while it lasted; but
it soon died away, and he was back in the midway of a London night with
icy stretches of sheet to right and left of him instead of golden
fields.

_Now the darkness gathers,_
_Stars begin to peep,_
_Birds and beasts and flowers_
_Soon will be asleep._

But rats did not sleep; they were at their worst and wake-fullest in the
night time.

_Jesu, give the weary_
_Calm and sweet repose,_
_With thy tenderest blessing_
_May mine eyelids close._

Mark waited a full five seconds in the hope that he need not finish the
hymn; but when he found that he was not asleep after five seconds he
resumed:

_Grant to little children_
_Visions bright of Thee;_
_Guard the sailors tossing_
_On the deep blue sea._