How we "pottered" through the days!--with what needless formalities, what slowness, what indecision! How fatiguing is enforced idleness! How lengthy were the evening meals, where we sat, trifling with the vine-leaves under a single dish of fruit, till the gloaming deepened into gloom! At fifteen one is very susceptible of impressions; very impatient of what one is not used to.

The very four-post bed in which I slept oppressed me, and the cracked basin held together for years by the circular hole in the old-fashioned washstand.

The execution-picture only made me laugh now.
Then, as to the meals.

No doubt a great many people eat and drink too much, as we are beginning to discover.

Whether we at the Vicarage did, I cannot say; but the change to the unsubstantial fare on which very old people like the Vandaleurs keep the flickering light of life aglow was very great; and yet in this slow, vegetating existence my appetite soon died away.