d to have to go to church twice every Sunday, and to Sunday
school before forenoon service beside. I cannot express the extreme
dreariness to me, poor little boy, of perching on those uncomfortable,
old-fashioned, grown-up seats, too high for my little legs, too wide for
my short thighs, so that I sat backless above and dangling below. What
had I to do with those grown-up sermons? Men's talk is babble to a
child, as much as children's to a man. The wind that blew past my ears
meant as much, and sounded better. Or what were the prayers to me, or
the singing? This perfunctory, formal early piety of mine had much
influence, long afterward, by natural reaction. Nothing can better
shadow forth the weariness of those weekly _jornadas del muerto_ than
the fact that I found now and then an oasis of delight in pious stories
for children, out of the Sabbath-school library. Thus we hear of
starving men chewing upon an old boot, or famished desert-travellers
sucking rapturously at a hole full of mud. I remember once being so
absorbed in a story during sermon-time, that, coming to a word of new
and queer physiognomy, and having forgotten all circumstance, I repeated
it, according to my custom, quite aloud. "Cuddy," I said, in the middle
of the silence of a pause in the sermon. Everybody stared quickly at me.
I might as well have uttered a round oath. The awful shame that flushed
me and crushed me cannot be imagined. My parents talked kindly, but
seriously, to me for such an irreverence; yet I suspect that by
themselves they laughed. This book was a story called "Erminia," with an
East India voyage in it. I don't know why the name should stick so fast
in my memory these thirty years.

My parents, alike inflexible in hygiene and morality, had reasons out of
either realm against those stomachic reinforcements to religion which
can mollify so sweetly the child's desert pathway through "meeting."
Neither cooky, raisin, nor peppermint lozenge would they dispense. It
would violate two important rules,--"Attend to the sermon," and "No
eating between meals";--the latter law, otherwise of Medo-Persic
stringency, having only this severe and secular exception: "My son, if
you are hungry, you can eat a piece of good dry bread. You may have
that."

So much the more lovely is the remembrance of that kind interceder,
usually an occupant of the same pew with ourselves, who, regarding the
minister the while with unmoved countenance, was wont ever an