farthingaled wife on a fifteenth-century tomb. Behind them, again, at
some little distance, we and our visitor. With the best will in the
world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter. The room is
altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to
throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it.
I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither
bulky nor obese, of a flat back and vigorous shoulders. His face is
generally hidden in his hands, but once or twice he lifts it to scan the
proportions of my late grandfather's preposterously fat cob, whose
portrait hangs on the wall above his head.

There is no doubt that on some days the devil reigns with a more potent
sway over people than on others. Tonight he has certainly entered into
the boys. He often does a little, but this evening he is holding a great
and mighty carnival among them. While father's strong, hard voice
vibrates in a loud, dull monotone through the silent room, they are
engaged in a hundred dumb yet ungodly antics behind his back.

Algernon has thrust his head far out between the rungs of his
chair-back, and affects to be unable to withdraw it again, making
movements of simulated suffocation. The Brat is stealthily walking on
his knees across the space that intervenes between them to Barbara, with
intent, as I too well know, of unseemly pinchings. If father unbutton
his eyes, or move his head one barley-corn, we are all dead men. I hold
my breath in a nervous agony. Thank Heaven! the harsh recitation still
flows on with equable loud slowness. In happy ignorance of his
offspring's antics, father is still asking, or rather ordering, the
Almighty (for there is more of command than entreaty in his tone) to
prosper the High Court of Parliament. Also the Brat is now returning to
his place, travelling with surprising noiseless rapidity over the Turkey