They retreated with a less staid pace than usual, and I sought Aunt Mercy, who was preparing the Sunday’s dinner.  Twilight drew near, and the Sunday’s clouds began to fall on my spirits.  Between sundown and nine o’clock was a tedious interval.  I was not allowed to go to bed, nor to read a secular book, or to amuse myself with anything.  A dim oil-lamp burned on the high shelf of the middle room, our ordinary gathering-place.  Aunt Mercy sat there, rocking in a low chair; the doors were open, and I wandered softly about.  The smell of the garden herbs came in faintly, and now and then I heard a noise in the water-butt under the spout, the snapping of an old rafter, or something falling behind the wall.  The toads crawled from under the plantain leaves, and hopped across the broad stone before the kitchen door, and the irreverent cat, with whom I sympathized, raced like mad in the grass.  Growing duller, I went to the cellar door, which was in the front entry, opened it, and stared down in the black gulf, till I saw a gray rock rise at the foot of the stairs which affected my imagination.  The foundation of the house was on the spurs of a great granite bed, which rose from the Surrey shores, dipped and cropped out in the center of Barmouth.  It came through the ground again in the woodhouse, smooth and round, like the bald head of some old Titan, and in the border of the garden it burst through in narrow ridges full of seams.  As I contemplated the rock, and inhaled a moldy atmosphere whose component parts were charcoal and potatoes, I heard the first stroke of the nine o’clock bell, which hung in the belfry of the church across the street.  Although it was so near us that we could hear the bellrope whistle in its grooves, and its last hoarse breath in the belfry, there was no reverberation of its clang in the house; the rock under us struck back its voice.  It was an old Spanish bell, Aunt Mercy told me.  How it reached Barmouth she did not know.  I recognized its complaining voice afterward.  It told me it could never forget it had been baptized a Catholic; and it pined for the beggar who rang it in the land of fan-leaved chestnuts!  It would growl and strangle as much as possible in the hands of Benjamin Beals, the bell-ringer and coffin-maker of Barmouth.  Except in the morning when it called me up, I was glad to hear it.  It was the signal of time past; the oftener I heard it, the nearer I was to the end of my year.  Before it ceased to ring now Aunt Mercy called me in a low voice.  I returned to the middle room, and took a seat in one of the oak chairs, whose back of upright rods was my nightly penance.  Aunt Mercy took the lamp from the shelf, and placed it upon a small oak stand, where the Bible lay.  Grand’ther entered, and sitting by the stand read a chapter.  His voice was like opium.  Presently my head rolled across the rods, and I felt conscious of slipping down the glassy seat.  After he had read the chapter he prayed.  If the chapter had been long, the prayer was short; if the