But still I had never seen a subject-picture, although my stepmother used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I went, with my Father, to examine Mr. Holman Hunt’s ’Finding of Christ in the Temple’ which at this time was announced to be on public show at our neighbouring town.  We paid our shillings and ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and uncompromising picture.  We looked at it for some time in silence, and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished the high priest.

Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed astonishment and dislike of what they called the ‘Preraphaelite’ treatment, but we were not affected by that.  Indeed, if anything, the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr. Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro.  This large, bright, comprehensive picture made a very deep impression upon me, not exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural specimen.  I was pleased to have seen it, as I was pleased to have seen the comet, and the whale which was brought to our front door on a truck.  It was a prominent addition to my experience.

The slender expansions of my interest which were now budding hither and thither do not seem to have alarmed my Father at all.  His views were short; if I appeared to be contented and obedient, if I responded pleasantly when he appealed to me, he was not concerned to discover the source of my cheerfulness.  He put it down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a reflection of the sunshine of grace beaming upon me through no intervening clouds of sin or doubt.  The ‘saints’ were, as a rule, very easy to comprehend; their emotions lay upon the surface.  If they were gay, it was because they had no burden on their consciences, while, if they were depressed, the symptom might be depended upon as showing that their consciences were troubling them, and if they were indifferent and cold, it was certain that they were losing their faith and becoming hostile to godliness.  It was almost a mechanical matter with these simple souls.  But, although I was so much younger, I was more complex and more crafty than the peasant ‘saints’.  My Father, not a very subtle psychologist, applied to me the same formulas which served him well at the chapel, but in my case the results were less uniformly successful.

The excitement of school-life and the enlargement of my circle of interests, combined to make Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious occasion.  The absence of every species of recreation on the Lord’s Day grew to be a burden which might scarcely be borne.  I have said that my freedom during the week had now become considerable; if I was at home punctually at meal times, the rest of my leisure was not challenged.  But this liberty, which in the summer holidays came to surpass that of ’fishes that tipple in the deep’, was put into more and more painful contrast with the unbroken servitude of Sunday.