.

At Mrs.Ridley's.
Saint Peter of Alcantara, as I have read in a life of St.Theresa, informed that devout lady that he had passed forty years of his life sleeping only an hour and a half each day; his cell was but four feet and a half long, so that he never lay down: his pillow was a wooden log in the stone wall: he ate but once in three days: he was for three years in a convent of his order without knowing any one of his brethren except by the sound of their voices, for he never during this period took his eyes off the ground: he always walked barefoot, and was but skin and bone when he died.

The eating only once in three days, so he told his sister Saint, was by no means impossible, if you began the regimen in your youth.

To conquer sleep was the hardest of all austerities which he practised:--I fancy the pious individual so employed, day after day, night after night, on his knees, or standing up in devout meditation in the cupboard--his dwelling-place; bareheaded and barefooted, walking over rocks, briars, mud, sharp stones (picking out the very worst places, let us trust, with his downcast eyes), under the bitter snow, or the drifting rain, or the scorching sunshine--I fancy Saint Peter of Alcantara, and contrast him with such a personage as the Incumbent of Lady Whittlesea's Chapel, Mayfair.
His hermitage is situated in Walpole Street, let us say, on the second floor of a quiet mansion, let out to hermits by a nobleman's butler, whose wife takes care of the lodgings.

His cells consist of a refectory, a dormitory, and an adjacent oratory where he keeps his shower-bath and boots--the pretty boots trimly stretched on boot-trees and blacked to a nicety (not varnished) by the boy who waits on him.