out the candle, and had sunken on my knees in my night-gown. Then
it was that my deadness made itself felt, in the mechanical
address I put up, the emptiness of my language, the absence of
all real unction.

I never could contrive to ask God for spiritual gifts in the same
voice and spirit in which I could ask a human being for objects
which I knew he could give me and which I earnestly desired to
possess. That sense of the reality of intercession was for ever
denied me, and it was, I now see, the stigma of my want of faith.
But at the time, of course, I suspected nothing of the kind, and
I tried to keep up my zeal by a desperate mental flogging, as if
my soul had been a peg-top.

In nothing did I gain from the advent of my stepmother more than
in the encouragement she gave to my friendships with a group of
boys of my own age, of whom I had now lately formed the
acquaintance. These friendships she not merely tolerated, but
fostered; it was even due to her kind arrangements that they took
a certain set form, that our excursions started from this house
or from that on regular days. I hardly know by what stages I
ceased to be a lonely little creature of mock-monographs and mud-
pies, and became a member of a sort of club of eight or ten
active boys. The long summer holidays of 1861 were set in an
enchanting brightness.

Looking back, I cannot see a cloud on the terrestrial horizon--I
see nothing but a blaze of sunshine; descents of slippery grass
to moons of snow-white shingle, cold to the bare flesh; red
promontories running out into a sea that was like sapphire; and
our happy clan climbing, bathing, boating, lounging, chattering,
all the hot day through. Once more I have to record the fact,
which I think is not without interest, that precisely as my life
ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct. I have no
difficulty in recalling, with the minuteness of a photograph,
scenes in which my Father and I were the sole actors within the
four walls of a room, but of the glorious life among wild boys on
the margin of the sea I have nothing but vague and broken
impressions, delicious and illusive.

It was a remarkable proof of my Father's temporary lapse into
indulgence that he made no effort to thwart my intimacy with
these my new companions. He was in an unusually humane mood
himself. His marriage was one proof of it; another was the
composition at this time of the most picturesque, easy and
graceful of all his w