amusements were one after another relinquished, though not
without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at
tipcat he paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick
in his hand. He had heard a voice asking him whether he would
leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell;
and he had seen an awful countenance frowning on him from the
sky. The odious vice of bellringing he renounced; but he still
for a time ventured to go to the church tower and look on while
others pulled the ropes. But soon the thought struck him that,
if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall on his
head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To give up
dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months
elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this darling
sin. When this last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when
tried by the maxims of that austere time, faultless. All Elstow
talked of him as an eminently pious youth. But his own mind was
more unquiet than ever. Having nothing more to do in the way of
visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures to
supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had
relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some
special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of
fantasies which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to
Bedlam.

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of
Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he
partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by
his father, who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a
Jew.