Occasionally we took winter walks together, my Father and I, down some lane that led to a sight of the sea, or over the rolling downs.  We tried to recapture the charm of those delightful strolls in London, when we used to lean over the bridges and watch the ducks.  But we could not recover this pleasure.  My Father was deeply enwoven in the chain of his own thoughts, and would stalk on, without a word, buried in angry reverie.  If he spoke to me, on these excursions, it was a pain to me to answer him.  I could talk on easy terms with him indoors, seated in my high chair, with our heads on a level, but it was intolerably laborious to look up into the firmament and converse with a dark face against the sky.  The actual exercise of walking, too, was very exhausting to me; the bright red mud, to the strange colour of which I could not for a long while get accustomed, becoming caked about my little shoes, and wearying me extremely.  I would grow petulant and cross, contradict my Father, and oppose his whims.  These walks were distressing to us both, yet he did not like to walk alone, and he had no other friend.  However, as the winter advanced, they had to be abandoned, and the habit of our taking a ‘constitutional’ together was never resumed.

I look back upon myself at this time as upon a cantankerous, ill-tempered and unobliging child.  The only excuse I can offer is that I really was not well.  The change to Devonshire had not suited me; my health gave the excellent Miss Marks some anxiety, but she was not ready in resource.  The dampness of the house was terrible; indoors and out, the atmosphere seemed soaked in chilly vapours.  Under my bed-clothes at night I shook like a jelly, unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings, while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh.  I could eat nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo.  Miss Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl of which appeared at every meal.  In consequence the hiccough lessened, but my strength declined with it.  I languished in a perpetual catarrh.  I was roused to a conscious-ness that I was not considered well by the fact that my Father prayed publicly at morning and evening ‘worship’ that if it was the Lord’s will to take me to himself there might be no doubt whatever about my being a sealed child of God and an inheritor of glory.  I was partly disconcerted by, partly vain of, this open advertisement of my ailments.

Of our dealings with the ‘Saints’, a fresh assortment of whom met us on our arrival in Devonshire, I shall speak presently.  My Father’s austerity of behaviour was, I think, perpetually accentuated by his fear of doing anything to offend the consciences of these persons, whom he supposed, no doubt, to be more sensitive than they really were.  He was fond of saying that ’a very little stain upon the conscience makes a wide breach in our communion with God’, and he counted possible errors of conduct by hundreds and by thousands.  It was in this winter that his attention was particularly drawn to the festival of Christmas, which, apparently, he had scarcely noticed in London.