ived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the
procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on.
'Heaven forgive me,' said he, 'and those who trained me. How I have
hated this day!'

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands
before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced
business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was
going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and
drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--and which, for the further
attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line
with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 &
7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military
deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times
a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly
have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or
two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the
interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and
unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--bound, like her
own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards,
with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a
wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves--as if it, of
all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural
affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a
little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy
length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no
more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than
if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays,
all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing
before him. 'Beg pardon, sir,' said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table.
'Wish see bed-room?'

'Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.'

'Chaymaid!' cried the waiter. 'Gelen box num seven wish see room!'

'Stay!' said Clennam, rousing himself. 'I was not thinking of what I
said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going
home.'

'Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.'

He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses
opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitan