On Lord's Day, March the Sixth 1853, being the first Sabbath after my fifth birthday, I was taken to Meeting.

Meeting!—one social sphere my Grandmother and Great-Aunt knew; their one earthly club, set, milieu; company of saints, little flock of the elect, assembling together of the chosen of God from Eternity!

I awoke to find Grandmother standing by my bed; which was unusual, for I always woke myself.

"'Tis a great and notable day, my dear; the day you are to join with the Lord's people in prayer and praise. I want to pray with 'ee."

I got out of my bed, and when she had put around me the old red dressing gown, we knelt down together by the bedside, and the Lord was besought to vouchsafe that my first public acquaintance with His People might be abundantly blessed to me. After breakfast I was sent upstairs to my bedroom to meditate apart for an hour before Meeting; an exercise ordained henceforward every Sunday of my life.

About a quarter-past-ten we sallied forth, Mary in green corduroy between Grandmother in her Sunday black and Aunt Jael with her go-to-Meeting blue-velvet-ribboned bonnet. I should now behold the inside of the Room, antechamber of Heaven; I should join in public worship with the Saints. Curiosity alone did not stir me; in some vague exalted way, I hoped to get nearer to the Lord.

The Room was a bare little tabernacle in a side-street, built in the Noah's Ark style dear also to Methodism. Grandmother took my hand as we mounted the steps from the street; we passed into the Holy Place. I received at once the curious effect of a light bluish mist which, though brighter, reminded me of the thick blue gloom of my attic, and which was caused by the light blue distempered brick of the walls and ceiling. There were eight windows in the Room, which was many times larger than our parlour and by far the largest place I had ever entered; each consisted of twenty-four small square panes, six in the perpendicular by four breadthways, a source for years to come of endless countings and pattern-weavings and mystical mathematical tricks. There were two of these windows at each end of the room, and two down each side. All eight were set so high as almost to merge into the ceiling. The curious result was that while near the floor it was comparatively dark, the upper part of the room was very light. A symbol, I thought; for Earth is dark, but Heaven bright. Aunt Jael led the way up a druggeted sort of aisle to the front row where we alone sat: the family's immemorial place, though purchased by no worldly pew-rent. In the first rush of newness I but dimly apprehended the benches of black-clad figures we had passed. Immediately in front of us stood the Lord's Table, covered with spotless white damask, and laden with two tall bottles of wine, two great pewter tankards, and two cottage-loaves on plates. Beyond the Table was a low raised dais from which the Gospel was preached at the evening meetings for unbelievers; never used at the Breakings of Bread, for all Saints are equal, and none may stand above his fellows. On either side of the Table, however, respectively to our right and left were the (unofficial) seats of the mighty: Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge and Brother Brawn on one side, Brother Quappleworthy and Brother Browning on the other. On the wall at the far end was a clock, loudly audible in the abysmal silences of prayer.

I did not absorb all the details at a first glance; nor do I really remember the particular texts, expositions and hymns of that initiatory day. What I do always retain and rehearse in my mind is rather one "Type" meeting, from first silence to final benediction; an ideal combination of many different Lord's Days, in which I have unconsciously fitted together Brothers, events, homilies, each in most typical essence.

This morning meeting, the Breaking of Bread, was the meeting par excellence. The Breaking of the Bread and the drinking of wine were the central acts of a tense and devout program of prayer, of reading and exposition of the Word, and of hymn-singing, unaccompanied by any choir or instrument of music. Only Saints were bidden, i. e., those who had testified aloud to the saving grace of the body and the blood, and had taken up their Cross in public baptism. We were no ordinary Dissenting chapel, where "All are welcome":—the more the merrier, more grist to the mill, more pennies on the plate, more souls for the Kingdom. Only the Lord's own chosen testified people were deemed worthy of this solemn privilege of eating His sacred Body and drinking His sacred Blood; and only they were admitted. The only exceptions were a few children, like myself, who could not be left at home by their elders. A few non-privileged adults very occasionally came: old friends of the Meeting who for some reason of reluctance or uncertainty were untestified and unbaptized, or strangers, drawn by sympathy or curiosity; but earthen platter and pewter mug were zealously snatched away if such alien hands essayed to grasp them. (So too was the collecting-box. I have seen visitors with outstretched arm and generous shilling gasp with surprise as the money-box was drawn rudely out of their reach. Unlike worldlywise church or chapel, we would touch none but hallowed gold. The collection was as close a privilege as the communion.)

On an average morning we were fifty or sixty strong; more women than men, more old than young, more wan than hale, more humble than high. With dough of small shopkeepers, masons, artisans, gardeners, old women with pathetic private incomes, washerwomen, charwomen, servants, we had leaven of more comfortable middle-class people like Grandmother and Aunt Jael, or "better" folk still like Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, or best of all dear Brother Quappleworthy, our graduate of the University of Oxford, our cousin by marriage with a peer of England! Believers in the aristocratic principle would have noted with satisfaction that from this blue-blooded minority were drawn almost all the "Leading Saints."

We were a community. The better-to-do helped the poor, and remembered that all were equal before God. Odd folk and sane folk, stupid folk and wise folk: with all their failings, a more gentle, worthy, sincere and trustful company of followers of Jesus of Nazareth could not have been found in this whole world or century. The fault they were farthest from is the one the fool most often imputes: hypocrisy. They were, of course, a varied company; it takes all sorts to make a Meeting.

Our Leading Brothers were Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, with Brothers Brawn, Browning, Briggs, Quappleworthy, Quick, and Quaint. The last was only included just to round things off and to justify Mr. Pentecost's holy pleasantry "The Lord is watching us: let us mind our B's and Q's," for he was really quite an obscure brother who rarely broke silence, and then to pray so pessimistically that he can never have expected his petitions to be heard, let alone answered.

To be Leading Brother implied merely this: to stand out of the ruck of silent members, either in prayer or exposition of the Word. Many an obscure Brother, however, who would never have risked his hand at prayer or exposition occasionally blurted into a morning's modest fame by announcing a hymn. A stir of special interest was always felt in the Meeting on such occasions, and it was whispered that "the Lord was notably working in Brother So-and-So." Giving out a hymn was after all not so mean a performance. Every line of every verse was slowly enunciated by the chooser before we began to sing. The church and chapel habit of reading out only the first verse (or even line!) struck me as very odd and meagre when I first encountered it many years later. Prayer, however, was the favourite form of self-expression. All the Leading Saints were "powerful in prayer."

Exposition either followed or accompanied the reading of a portion of the Word. It was our "sermon." Our five regular expounders were Mr. Pentecost, Brothers Quappleworthy (the chief), Brawn, Browning and Briggs.

Though in theory we allowed no official ruler of the synagogue, in practice Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge was our Great High Priest. He alone was spoken of as Mister. He alone was immune from error and criticism. It is hard for me to reconstruct his personality now, when my own mentality is so different from when I knew him, when he prayed for me, blessed me, took me on his knees. It is still harder to convey to this generation the reverence in which his venerable white hairs were held. The world in which he ruled, the Saints' world, may have been small; but within its pale, through all England, he was revered as the holiest child of man. And we of the Tawborough Meeting possessed him for ourselves: in his old age he ceased to travel, and left us but little. We shone in the reflected glory of his presence; knew ourselves the Meeting of Meetings, called blessed of the Lord. He lived by prayer alone: the anonymous gifts of money on which he chiefly lived came to him whence he did not know, except that they came from God. In the old ancestral house another famous Pentecost Dodderidge had built he still lived; in one hallowed room he welcomed all who came to him for their souls' good; another was fitted as a workshop, and here till after his eightieth year he spent a portion of every day at the lathe. He could preach in eight languages, in five of them fluently. He never rose later than four and devoted the three hours before breakfast to "knee-drill," i. e., incessant prayer. He baptized believers in the river Taw till his eightieth year. One memorable immersion of which I shall speak later took place when he had turned eighty-four. His one kink was a trick of godly epigrams and holy repartees, cunningly led up to, of which he was as nearly vain as he could be. I remember Aunt Jael once saying to him in our dining-room at Bear Lawn:

"Your 'Life' should be written, Mr. Pentecost."

"But it is being written, dear sister," he replied. "It will be published in the morning."

"Published? Where?"

"Beyond the sky. The author is the Lord Jesus Christ. The ink is His precious Blood."

Another day my Grandmother asked him if he would begin to remember me in his prayers.

"I cannot," he replied gently.

"Cannot?" faltered my Grandmother.

"No, I cannot begin to pray for her. I have begun already."

For all his eminence Pentecost took no preponderating share in worship, nor ever made himself like the "Ministering Brothers" of some other meetings, who prayed almost all the prayers, chose almost all the hymns, gave one long sermon-like piece of exposition, and officiated alone at the Lord's Table—for all the world like a dissenting parson in his chapel or a priest in his church.

Second in importance stood Brother Brawn, a fat, doddering, bleating, weak-at-the-knees old bachelor and Christian; the maid-of-all-work of the Meeting, who distributed the offertory, paid the caretaker, saw to the heating and cleaning of the room, and bought the bread and wine. With his white waggly little beard and gentle animal features he looked absurdly like a goat, and ba-a-a-d just like one too. He had two little homilies only, which he and we knew by heart; one on 'Ell and the other on Mysteries, often given one after the other to form a continuous whole. Some of the Saints, I fear, dared to think these holy discourses dull. Not so Miss Salvation Clinker, who declared that "ivry word wat falls from 'is blessed lips is a purl uv great price."

Brother Quappleworthy, who stood equal in importance, was a striking contrast. He was our intellect, our light of learning, our peer's cousin-in-law. His erudition in real Hebrew and real Greek ranked with Brother Brawn's devotion, if a little lower than Pentecostal saintliness. Sneer we never so smugly at the filthiness of mere book knowledge, not one of us but was somehow elated to hear that favourite phrase: "Now in the original Greek—" His supplications, if acceptable to many, were perhaps too much of a muchness. It was all "Yea Lord, Nay Lord, Oh Lord, Ah Lord, If Lord...."

After Brother Quappleworthy, Brother Browning was our most frequent speaker. He came to Meeting accompanied by his little boy Marcus, the most youthful person present save me, but not, alas, by his spouse, who belonged, alas, to that pernicious sect of Bible Christians whom he (seven times alas) did occasionally himself frequent.

There was Brother Briggs, by vocation an oilman's handyman, whose face always shone with oil of happiness and hope, whose utterances were charged with an uncontrollable optimism and joy, a ringing, shouting, h-less content with the universe. The learned would call it cosmic expansiveness. Beside him Walt Whitman was a prophet of despair, Mark Tapley a misanthrope. His favourite word was "bewtivul" and he used it without mercy. There was Brother Quaint, the gloomy pray-er. There was Brother Lard, who emitted from his mouth periodic noises—signs of bad manners and digestion—which it is unusual to mention on paper: endemic endeavours that punctuated the subtlest exposition of Quappleworthy, the dreariest prayer of Quaint's, and added a spice of charm and unexpectedness to the whole service. I enjoyed them coarsely; with solemn face, pious unawareness. One joyous occasion I remember when Brother Quappleworthy was beginning the eighth chapter of the Revelation in his most impressive style. At the words "There was silence in heaven about the space of half-an-hour," he paused dramatically to illustrate, as it were, the meaning. Then, after five seconds of rapt silence, Brother Lard trumpeted forth: long, loud, luscious, lingering; a diapason of swaying sound and chronic indigestion. To the eternal credit of my Grandmother and Great-aunt, I record it that they smiled.... There was Brother Marks, a thin unhappy-looking man, wearing large black-rimmed spectacles, who mourned in a far corner apart, and never uttered a word or even joined in the hymns. I thought him a sinister figure; his goggles repelled me; I associated him by some vague but authentic impulse with the Personal Devil.

The Sisters were of course less important than the Brothers. "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak." Above all the others towered Sister Vickary and Sister Lee. My Grandmother was universally loved. Before Aunt Jael the whole meeting quailed. Brother Briggs grovelled. Brother Brawn obeyed, Brother Quappleworthy deferred. She herself deferred to Pentecost Dodderidge alone; indeed the veneration she felt for the venerable instrument of her conversion, her Ananias of Damascus, was touching in so masterful a soul. In the ledgers of the Lord, I make bold to guess, it stands to her credit. In the counsels of the elders she was supreme; she was the wise woman of the Proverbs. No decision affecting the welfare of the flock could be taken by Pentecost or Brawn without the assent of the Shepherdess, as the former called her, perhaps not unmindful of her crook. No meeting felt it had the right—or courage—to begin without her presence. When it was over, she walked out first, bowing to right and left like an Empress as she stalked the length of the Room. She had as much common-sense as any other three Saints added together. Not a soul of them loved her.

* * * * * * *

We arrived each Lord's day about twenty-five past ten. When all were assembled, there was a period of five or ten minutes' absolute silence, broken only by the strident ticking of the clock. Some pairs of eyes were closed in silent prayer, others stared straight before them at some heavenly object of reflection.

Up rose Brother Browning. "Let us sing together to the glory of the Lord hymn number one-four-two: 'We praise Thee, O Jehovah!'" There was a turning of leaves, for at this time most of us possessed hymn-books, though a few of the older generation, including Aunt Jael, viewed all hymn-books as snares of the Devil, and bore witness against the fleshly innovation by still singing always from memory. Brother Browning read aloud the whole hymn:

We sang sitting. Oh, inharmonious howl! Some Brother—usually Brother Schulz, who was fancied to possess musical talent—pitched the key and set the time as he fancied. The latter was always funereally slow, the former more often than not much too high or too low to be persevered with. Not that that mattered. Somebody would merely switch off into another key anything from a semitone to an octave higher or lower as the case might be: switching part of the way back again if the change proved too drastic. The consequence of this go-as-you-please policy was that a hymn would sometimes be sung in four different times and seven or eight different keys. Above all the holy din you could hear Brother Briggs bawling forth his joy in the Lord; higher still the awful metallic howl of Sister Yeo.

When the hymn was done there was another space of complete silence till the spirit moved Brother Quappleworthy to utterance. Once on his feet, he found his two Bibles, English and Greek, rather difficult to wield, especially as his reading from the Word hardly ever consisted of one solid chapter read straight through, but of snippets of two or three verses each from half-a-dozen different books, connected only by their (imagined) relevance to the topic he had in mind: grace or trustfulness or hope or sin. We all followed him in our own Bibles: so that his Reading had orchestral accompaniment of zealous page-rustlings. "Let us read together in the Book of Genesis, that sixth chapter and those fifth, sixth and seventh verses ... and now let us turn to the Book of Job, the fifth chapter and the thirteenth verse ... and now a verse in that sweet Second Epistle of Peter, the second chapter and that fourth verse...."

After we had rustled backwards and forwards for a few minutes, Brother Quappleworthy closed first one Bible and then the other with two emphatic snaps, and put them under his left arm, leaving his right hand free to gesticulate,—more especially the right forefinger, which ever and anon he brandished to exhort, to emphasize, to warn, to wheedle. "Well, brethren, the upshot and outcome of all that we have read is—ah—manifest. It is—ah—this. He alone saved us from the pit. He alone, not—ah—another. He saved us—miserable sinners, grovelling worms—us and none others. Far be it from us ever to think ourselves worthy of such grace and favour! Far otherwise!—but so He willed. Our souls—your soul, ah, my soul—would have gone into eternal darkness save for Him, the Lord,—???i?? [Greek: Kyrios]—how I love it in the old Greek! He alone, brethren, can—ah—renew our natures; and can—ah—shape better desires for our natures when renewed—can show us the more excellent way!..."

After a new silence, the spirit would move Brother Brawn to clamber to his feet, and give us his changeless utterance on "'Ell" or "Mysteries." I give it with a word for word accuracy I cannot often vouch for. His er-er was a bleating sort of stammer much less elegant than Brother Quappleworthy's ah.

"My mind, brethren, 'as bin—er—er dwellin' much all through the mornin' on the subject of 'Ell. On the torments and 'orrors that all the 'eathen and unsaved will taste down there below, yes, and are tastin' at this very minnit as we are praisin' the Lord 'ere in this Rume. Torments and—er—er—er—'orrors. You know. I know. And they torments are for all the sinners an' unsaved: ivry wan uv them, not for some jis', as I've 'eard folk say. No for all, all, ALL, A L L. You mark my words. All the 'eathen shall be 'urled to 'Ell, whether they've 'eard or whether they 'aven't!" (This last sentence he sing-songed with violent emphasis, clapping his hands together at the syllables I have marked) "O Yes! I can imagine 'em wallering in the brimstone and sulphur. I know. We shall be wi' Lazarus in Abraham's—er—er—bosom, and they will be down the fiery gulf, down in the fiery pit. So, brethren, let us be ready for the Lord, let us make sure uv our place in the bosom, not the pit. Bosom for us! BOSOM! We must watch and er—er—pray. We must. I'm sure we must."

A pause. He shifted his feet clumsily. His thick lips moved stupidly as he made mental preparations for Part Two.

"My mind, brethren, 'as been—er—er—dwellin' much on another subjict this mornin', the subjict of Mysteries. It has; I'm sure it has. There are two mysteries. There is the mystery of godliness, that's one; and the mystery of iniquity, that's two. It all 'appened at the Fall. The Fall was when the mystery of godliness became the mystery of iniquity; an' the mystery of iniquity became the mystery of godliness; all mixmuddled up together as you mid say. It became 'ard to-er—er—tell 'em apart. 'Tis only 'Is chosen ones as can do it—that's you and me, brethren—and 'tain't orwis easy for us. Let us try to know one from the other, and if we tries our 'ardest, the Lord will 'elp us to. Yes 'E will. I'm sure 'E will."

After Brother Brawn, the beginning of the meeting was well over. We knew that the great moments were drawing near. A deeper silence filled the little room: the hush of pure holiness. There was a prayer or two, and then we sang the Bread hymn. Usually this one:

We sang it to a slow drawling tune, incommunicably dreary.

Pentecost arose, white and priestly. "Little children, every time I come to this Table, I come with a joy, a peace and a gratitude that are ever new. My heart is too full of love for my Saviour for any words of mine to tell you. Let us bear in mind, little children, rather His own precious words: This is my Body, which is given for you."

As he ceased, Brother Brawn arose from his seat at the right of the Table, took each of the loaves, held them sacrificially aloft, broke them in twain. One plate he himself passed round among the Saints, Brother Browning the other. I watched with evergreen curiosity and reverence how each Saint broke off a piece of bread and with closed eyes slowly munched it away. Once in a way the impious thought seized me that 'twas all farce, mummery, tomfoolery: this chewing of dough. The next instant I would flush crimson to have let such wickedness find place for an instant in my mind: I would look and behold the rapture on the munching faces; and understand beyond all doubting that here was something mystical, magical, holy. I could see that those who took bread obtained thereby some supernal joy that I was too young or too sinful to share. It could not be tomfoolery if it gave you the rapture I could see on the faces around me. Besides, Jesus had ordained it.

Another silence—the middle space of the double sacrifice—ere we sang the Wine hymn:

Brother Quick, in a low voice trembling with passion, prayed that God would make us worthy of this chief experience.

There was a moment of the holiest and most breathless silence I have ever known. I have stood alone at midnight when no birds sang, no leaf stirred, and the autumn stars shone silently through the unwhispering roof of a dark Russian forest. I have stood on the summit of the Great Gable and gazed at the wild soundless mountains all around, in that wild soundless moment before the dawn arrives. But never except in the Romish Mass, at that multitudinous most sacred moment when the heart stops beating, have I tasted so awful a silence as this, when the Spirit of God moved in the hearts of our little company. I did not greet Him in mine—not yet.

Brother Brawn uncorked the two bottles of wine and filled the tankards. The rapture on the faces round me was tenser than after the Bread: especially, I thought, in Pentecost's and my Grandmother's. The longing to share it possessed me more and more every day as I grew up. I hoped that at a very tender age I too might break the bread and drink the wine.

The third and last stage of the Meeting usually began with an utterance from Brother Briggs. If everything before had led up to the communion, Brother Briggs led on from it. He bellowed so loud that at times the roof rang. "Aw, my dear brethering, after the cup us all 'ave tasted, there be only one thing I'ze goin' to zay—Praise the Lawd, O my Sowl! Praise ye the Lawd! I'm only a pore hignorrint zinner, but I knaws this yer: That Jesus zhed 'Is bled vur me, and that 'tis uv 'Is precious bled as I've bin a-privil'ged to drink this mornin'. 'E 'ath 'olpen hus! O 'ow I luv that word hus! O 'ow I luv that word hus! Turn wi' me to the gauspel accordin' to St. Matthew, chapter eight verse zeventeen: 'Imself took our infirmities and bare our zickness. Praise 'Im, zes I, praise 'Im! Let ivry thing that 'ath breath praise the Lawd! Bewtivul! Bewtivul!

"Us shud orwis be praisin' 'Im, brethering, and us shud orwis be 'appy in 'Is love. Orwis 'appy! If us be un'appy, 'tis along of this yer—that us 'ave bin drinkin' of zum voul stream, instead uv they vountains uv 'Is love. And us are 'appy, arn't us, brethering? As I luke round at 'ee, all brothers and zisters, and zee what triumphs and trophies of grace ye all be, I zes to missel', and I cries aloud to 'eaven: Praise ye the Lawd! Bewtivul!

"'E 'ave dragged us up out of a norribull pit, a norribull pit, out o' the moiry clay, and shed 'Is blid that us may live wi' 'Im vur iver and ivermore. Turn wi' me to the blessid gauspel according to St. Jan, the sixth chapter and vivty-zixth verse, and 'earken to vat my Lawd zes there: 'E that eateth my flesh, 'e zes, an' drinketh my blid, dwelleth in me, 'e zes, an' I in 'im. O 'ow I luv that word 'Im.' O 'ow I luv that word 'Im! O the blessed thought: to dwell for iver in 'Im, an 'Im in us! Bewtivul! Bewtivul! Bewtivul!..."

Then would he bellow forth and would we sing "He sitteth o'er the waterfloods" or "I hear the Accuser Roar":—

Brother Brawn made the Announcements. On that first occasion, I remember, he made some reference to me ("One of tender years worshipping with us for the first time"), to my dedication to the Lord, and to his hopes that I might be made meet therefor.

Everybody stared. I flushed, with infant conceit rather than pious ecstasy: it was my first appearance in public. After Announcements, the Offertory. This was taken in a large square box divided into four slit compartments labelled in white painted capitals: MINISTRY, FOREIGN FIELD, POOR, EXPENSES. My Grandmother was always much exercised in her giving. Her own inclinations were more towards Poor and Foreign Field, but she felt she ought not to neglect less showy and alluring Expenses nor coyer, more elusive Ministry. She would compromise between duty and pleasure by putting a sixpence in all four, with perhaps an extra copper or two in Poor; of her modest income giving half-a-crown to the Lord at this morning service alone. Aunt Jael with a rather larger income (and no Mary to support) never gave more than a shilling between all four compartments. She also had a penchant for Expenses: I suppose it pleased her—waywardly—as the least human of the four.

(This fourfold collecting-box allowed a pleasurable width of choice, but a quite different consideration had led to its introduction and the supersession of the cloth bag formerly in use. During a period of several years a lump of sugar had been put in the bag every Lord's day at Breaking of Bread, and though clouds of prayer were offered up to soften the heart of the sinner-Saint who played this weekly prank upon his Meeting and his Maker, they were all of no avail. He (or she) hardened his heart; every Lord's day the bag was found to contain yet another impious lump. Stare Brother Brawn never so stark at every giving hand, the sinner remained undetected in his sweet career. It was finally suggested by Aunt Jael that a new type of box, with but a narrow slit for the coins to pass through, would baffle the evil-doer. The choice-of-beneficiare partisans united with her, and they evolved between them this fourfold enormity, with its meat-dish dimensions and its four defensive slits. Vain precautions! Idle hopes! All the sugar-sinner did was to insert a much smaller piece than before; usually in Foreign Field. It was a marvel to the Saints how he squeezed it through; a tragedy how he persevered in his sin.)

After the Offertory came perhaps another hymn and prayer; then the End. We all stood up and sang the following:

While we remained standing, Pentecost raised his hands in benediction. And so to dinner.

* * * * * * *

Breaking of Bread, though the principal service, was only one of five each Lord's Day at the Room, all of which I attended regularly before I was seven. There was but an hour at home for dinner ere I set forth for Lord's Day School at half past one, which lasted for an hour and was followed immediately by the Young Persons' Prayer-Meeting. I got home for tea, after which we all sallied forth to the Gospel Address for Unbelievers, usually delivered by Brother Browning, two hours long and dreary beyond belief, in a ghostly atmosphere of guttering candle-light. This was followed by another Prayer-Meeting, followed again, at least in the summer months, by the Street Testimony, when we all repaired to the Strand, and gathered together a mixed circle of friends and curious and scoffers—like the Salvation Army in the next generation. Even this was not the end; for at home there was Reading and prayers, just as on week-days. If I were more deadly-tired than usual after that awful Sunday, Aunt Jael would spin the prayer out and choose a specially long chapter. Most Sundays I went to bed half sick with fatigue, my head aching, hardly able to undress.

Smiling was forbidden, and I had little reason to break the rule. Tears, however, were allowed, and I shed them in plenty.

* * * * * * *

If Breaking of Bread was not our only Meeting, nor was our Room the only Meeting in the town. I knew of four others. First, the Grosvenor Street Branch Meeting, offspring of ours, in the special care of Brother Quappleworthy, who preached there on Sunday evenings. Salvation always derided my Grandmother and Aunt for calling it Grow-vner Street. "I'm no scholard," she said, "but tidden common-sense to mispernounce like that. Gross-veener 'tis, and Gross-veener ollers 'twill be!"

Second, there was the Close, Exclusive or Darbyite Meeting, ruled over by one Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, a giant-tall man with a flat white face, who reminded me of a walking tombstone. The Exclusives or Darbyites regarded us, I suppose, much as we regarded the rest of Christendom; as walkers in darkness. We regarded them as wandering sheep, foolish perhaps, rather than sinful. "Those brethren," Mr. Pentecost described them, "whose consciences lead them to refuse my fellowship and to deprive me of theirs." I never went to their Tawborough Meeting while I was a child.

Third, there was Brother Obadiah Tizzard's Upper Room for Celibate Saints, a kind of loft in which half-a-dozen old maids and two or three bachelors met together for meditation and breaking of bread. All were singular as all were single. Their service was one of silent hymnless worship interspersed by personal quarrels; silence broken by backchat. The last word as well as the first was with Salvation. Glory did duty for Brother Lard; less vulgar if more incessant. All were sustained by the conviction of their unique fidelity to scripture. "We break bread in an upper room," said Glory to my Grandmother time and again on Tuesday afternoons, "as did Jesus with the Twelve. We are poor an' 'umble: an' so was Jesus. We are not wed, an' no more was Jesus. We shall go to heaven pure: an' so did Jesus."

Fourth, there was Ebenezer. The name was applied indifferently to the meeting-room itself or to the one gentleman who attended it. He was the Meeting, the whole Meeting, and nothing but the Meeting. He sat on a bench for silent prayer all alone by himself, got up and read the Word aloud to himself, mounted on a little dais and lengthily harangued himself, handed round the bread and wine to himself, and (for all I know) took the collection from and appropriated it to himself. Ebenezer had once belonged to our Meeting, but in some occult way we had displeased him, and he left us for Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, leaving him also in turn for the straiter ways of Brother Obadiah Tizzard. Him even too he left finally, to worship God in his own way all alone. I doubt if he was really mad: odd only, and nearer to Heaven than Hanwell. His real name, if he had one, I never knew.

* * * * * * *

Perhaps I have said too much of the Meeting; for though the one great piece of the whole outer world I saw during many years, it was never more than that: something I saw. I was never of it, as of Eight Bear Lawn. It never helped to fashion my child's life or longings, nor touched at any time the inside life I led: the real Mary.

One other thing stands clearly apart in my memory as taking place that first Lord's Day.

Alone together at my bedside my Grandmother confirmed my dedication to the Lord's service. She told me of her vision, renewed that day as she had drunk the sacred wine, that I should serve Him as a Missionary in the foreign field with glory and honour. She told me of the trials and tribulations I should have to face; but that if a faithful steward, I should find my reward in heaven. Then she read aloud my favourite seventh Chapter of Revelation. When she came to the fourteenth verse, These are they which came out of great tribulation, I could keep silence no longer. I cried to her to stop. Words had already a magical effect on me, and could throw me into ecstasy. All through my childhood "tribulation" was big magic. Now it threw me into a trance of disordered emotion and delight.

"O Grandmother," I cried, "I will! I will! I will serve Jesus for ever! I am longing to go through tribulation, through lovely lovely tribulation!"

I broke into crying and laughing. I hungered to suffer, to embrace, kiss, adore, go mad, abase myself, throw myself on the floor before her feet, love, hold, possess, be possessed, mingle.... Why could she not put her arms around me, seize me, comfort me, crush me?

For one imperceptible moment my child's soul understood. The moment passed; too swift to be retained, even remembered.

Had I been dreaming? What was it all?... Yes, I had wanted something, something that Grandmother could not give, could not take.

"You're overwrought and tired, my dear," she was saying. "What you want is a good sleep."