"And perhaps she won't go to sleep before I go to sleep," he hoped.

At first Mark meditated upon bishops. The perversity of night thoughts
would not allow him to meditate upon the pictures of some child-loving
bishop like St. Nicolas, but must needs fix his contemplation upon a
certain Bishop of Bingen who was eaten by rats. Mark could not remember
why he was eaten by rats, but he could with dreadful distinctness
remember that the prelate escaped to a castle on an island in the middle
of the Rhine, and that the rats swam after him and swarmed in by every
window until his castle was--ugh!--Mark tried to banish from his mind
the picture of the wicked Bishop Hatto and the rats, millions of them,
just going to eat him up. Suppose a lot of rats came swarming up Notting
Hill and unanimously turned to the right into Notting Dale and ate him?
An earthquake would be better than that. Mark began to feel thoroughly
frightened again; he wondered if he dared call out to his mother and put
forward the theory that there actually was a rat in his room. But he had
promised her to be brave and unselfish, and . . . there was always the
evening hymn to fall back upon.

_Now the day is over,_
_Night is drawing nigh,_
_Shadows of the evening_
_Steal across the sky._

Mark thought of a beautiful evening in the country as beheld in a Summer
Number, more of an afternoon really than an evening, with trees making
shadows right across a golden field, and spotted cows in the foreground.
It was a blissful and completely soothing picture while it lasted; but
it soon died away, and he was back in the midway of a London night with