But gay and bright and happy as the Sunday was out of doors, inside our house it was dreary and penitential. My grandmother, a Leslie-Anstruther by birth, had inherited all the bigotry of the old Covenanters, and under her rule, kind and loving as it was on week-days, the Sabbath was a day on which no expression of joy was permitted. Many hours were consumed by her in various forms of deadly dull worship. Even we, mere children, had to sit through a service which was made as forbidding as it could be. She began with the morning service read from beginning to end, including the priestly absolution, which she delivered with peculiar unction; then came the Litany, which the professional cleric omits when the morning prayer has been given in its entirety; then the Communion service. By that time most performers would have been exhausted—not so my grandmother; she proceeded to deliver one of Blair’s sermons, and woe be to us if we yawned, or fidgeted, or were guilty of inattention! I remember one special Sunday. I must have been about six years old when I was promoted to a pair of trousers; they were made by the village tailor out of a hideous black-and-white check horse-cloth, very coarse and prickly, like the hair-shirt of a medieval saint. Every time I moved the sharp points entered into my tender flesh; to kneel was a penance, to get up again and sit down a torture. My fidgets and groans could not be restrained; they were a criminal interruption, and I was punished accordingly, but at any rate, in order that the punishment should be effective, the cruel trousers had to be taken down, and that was a consolation, though only temporary, and not unmixed with a counter-irritation of pain. In these circumstances religion was what the great Lord Halifax called “a _vertu_ stuck with bristles, too rough for this Age.” * * * * * In 1845 we stayed on at Trouville long after all the other summer visitors had fled, like the swallows. No one left but the fisherfolk and ourselves. In the late autumn the sea became leaden, ugly, cruel-looking. One stormy day when I fought my way as usual against the wind down to the deserted sands, close to where the bathing-machines were drawn up in idleness, I came upon a group of fishermen carrying something blue and limp, a belated bather whom they had risked their own lives to rescue from the waves growling savagely upon the beach, lashing themselves, as it seemed to me, into a fury at being robbed of their prey. It was difficult to believe that it was the same sea that a few short weeks before had rippled so gently, kissing the pretty feet of the paddling children! On such days as those I felt very much alone and longed to get back to the Gardens of the Tuileries and the merry games with our little _camarades_.