o at least
half a dozen of religious edifices, each to sit under his or her
favourite minister, the only man who went to church being Thomas
Newcome, accompanied by Tommy his little son, and Sarah his nurse, who
was, I believe, also his aunt, or at least his mother's first cousin.
Tommy was taught hymns, very soon after he could speak, appropriate
to his tender age, pointing out to him the inevitable fate of wicked
children, and giving him the earliest possible warning and description
of the punishment of little sinners. He repeated these poems to his
stepmother after dinner, before a great shining mahogany table,
covered with grapes, pineapples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and
surrounded by stout men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took
the little man between their knees, and questioned him as to his right
understanding of the place whither naughty boys were bound. They patted
his head with their fat hands if he said well, or rebuked him if he was
bold, as he often was.

Nurse Sarah or Aunt Sarah would have died had she remained many years in
that stifling garden of Eden. She could not bear to part from the child
whom her mistress and kinswoman had confided to her (the women had
worked in the same room at Newcome's, and loved each other always, when
Susan became a merchant's lady, and Sarah her servant). She was nobody
in the pompous new household but Master Tommy's nurse. The honest soul
never mentioned her relationship to the boy's mother, nor indeed did Mr.
Newcome acquaint his new family with that circumstance. The housekeeper
called her an Erastian: Mrs. Newcome's own serious maid informed against
her for telling Tommy stories of Lancashire witches, and believing in
the same. The black footman (madam's maid and the butler were of course
privately united) persecuted her with his addresses, and was even
encouraged by his mistress, who thought of sending him as a missionary
to the Niger. No little love, and fidelity, and constancy did honest
Sarah show and use during the years she passed at the Hermitage, and
until Tommy went to school. Her master, with many private prayers and
entreaties, in which he passionately recalled his former wife's memory
and affection, implored his friend to stay with him; and Tommy's
fondness for her and artless caresses, and the scrapes he got into, and
the howls he uttered over the hymns and catechisms which he was bidden
to learn (by Rev. T. Clack,, of Highbury College