After this learning and repeating our chapters from the Bible, while my Father and my Aunts were going about the cottages and villages near us on various errands of mercy, Roger and I had a free hour or two, during which we commonly resorted in summer to our perch on the apple-tree, and in winter to the chamber over the porch where the dried herbs were kept, where we held our weekly convocation as to all matters that came under our cognizance, domestic, personal, ecclesiastical, or political. Placidia was not excluded, but being four years older, she preferred "her book" and the society of our Aunts. Then came the sacred hour with our Father in his own chamber. Afterwards in winter, we often gathered round the fire in the great hall, we in the chimney-nook, and the men and maidens in an outer circle, while my Father told stories of the sufferings of holy men and women for conscience' sake, or while Dr. Antony (when he was visiting us) narrated to us his interviews with those who were languishing for truth or for liberty in various prisons throughout the realm. And so the night came, always, it seemed to us, sooner than on any other day. Although never until our visit at Davenant Hall did I understand the unspeakable blessing of that weekly closing of the doors on Time, and opening all the windows of the soul towards Eternity; the unspeakable lowering and narrowing of the whole being which follows on its neglect and loss. To us the Lord's Day was a day of Paradise; but I believe the barest Sabbath which was ever fenced round with prohibitions by the most rigid Puritanism, looking rather to the fence than the enclosure, rather to what is shut out than to what is cultivated within, is a boon and a blessing compared with the life without pauses, without any consecrated house for the soul built out of Time, without silences wherein to listen to the Voice that is heard best in silence. It was a point of honor and a badge of loyalty with many of the Cavaliers to protest against the Puritan observance of the Sabbath. The Lady Lucy, indeed, welcomed the sacred day, as she did everything else that was sacred and heavenly. She sang to her lute a lovely song in praise of the day from the new "Divine Poems" of Mr. George Herbert, and told me how he had sung it to his lute on his death-bed only a few years before, in 1632. "On Sunday heaven's gates stand ope," she sang; and I am sure they stood ever open to her. But the rest of the family, whilst reverencing her devout and charitable life, seemed to have no more thought of following it than if she had been a nun in a convent. Indeed, in a sense, she did dwell apart, cloistered in a hallowed atmosphere of her own.