[Illustration: musical notation: Oh, God, the Father of Heaven, Have mercy upon us miser-a-ble sinners.] The choir then repeated it in harmony, and the same simple musical material furnished the whole of the subsequent responses. Sung thus very slowly the Litany took a full quarter of an hour, but when that was over, I was at liberty to find my hat and steal out. I used to put my hat, a round soft felt hat with elastic under the chin, in an aperture at the corner of our seat below the stalls, which had in it an opening for ventilation. Sometimes my hat slipped down this, and after an excited groping for it, it came up covered with the dust of ages. The service had already lasted an hour or more, and I made my jaded way back to the Chancery, while my mother and sisters, and in the holidays, my two elder brothers, remained for the rest of the service. Martin and Arthur occupied stalls near my father and were still dim figures to me, at home only for a comparatively few weeks in the year, and having a sitting-room of their own. I used to be rather glad when they went to school, because my mother invented for me the title of “The Eldest Son at Home,” which could only be used in their absence. In the afternoon there was a family walk, and then Cathedral service again. Then came a reading of Sunday books, or a reading of the Bible with my father, and we went utterly fatigued to bed. It was not so much the plethora of religious exercises that caused this lassitude, but the entire absence of any recreation. Spare time (and there was not much of it) was supposed to be taken up with Bishop Heber’s Journal, _Agathos_ and _The Rocky Island_. Once a certain brightness came into these Sunday readings, because we were allowed a book called _Sunday Echoes in Week-day Hours_. There was a widowed mother in it, and her boy called Cecil, and their conversation about collects was so excruciatingly pious that it became merely humorous, and we invented fresh Cecil-talk among ourselves. We once indulged in this before my mother, who with a controlled countenance withdrew the delightful volume. I remember waking up after falling asleep one Sunday night, and hearing Compline going on in the chapel with another hymn, and thinking with amazement that they were still at it. In the way of a child, I think I was, from certain evidence that will appear, religious, but to put it quite frankly, I was sick of the whole affair by Sunday evening.