child. The only excuse I can offer is
that I really was not well. The change to Devonshire had not
suited me; my health gave the excellent Miss Marks some anxiety,
but she was not ready in resource. The dampness of the house was
terrible; indoors and out, the atmosphere seemed soaked in chilly
vapours. Under my bed-clothes at night I shook like a jelly,
unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings,
while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh. I could eat
nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent
hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my
back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss
Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl
of which appeared at every meal. In consequence the hiccough
lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a
perpetual catarrh. I was roused to a conscious-ness that I was
not considered well by the fact that my Father prayed publicly at
morning and evening 'worship' that if it was the Lord's will to
take me to himself there might be no doubt whatever about my
being a sealed child of God and an inheritor of glory. I was
partly disconcerted by, partly vain of, this open advertisement
of my ailments.

Of our dealings with the 'Saints', a fresh assortment of whom met
us on our arrival in Devonshire, I shall speak presently. My
Father's austerity of behaviour was, I think, perpetually
accentuated by his fear of doing anything to offend the
consciences of these persons, whom he supposed, no doubt, to be
more sensitive than they really were. He was fond of saying that
'a very little stain upon the conscience makes a wide breach in
our communion with God', and he counted possible errors of
conduct by hundreds and by thousands. It was in this winter that
his attention was particularly drawn to the festival of
Christmas, which, apparently, he had scarcely noticed in London.

On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an
almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as
nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to
him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of
idolatry. 'The very word is Popish', he used to exclaim,
'Christ's Mass!' pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who
tastes assafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the
antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen
rites, and itself a soiled relic of t