At Mrs. Ridley’s

Saint Peter of Alcantara, as I have read in a life of St. Theresa, informed that devout² 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 pious³ individual so employed, day after day, night after night, on his knees, or standing⁴ up in devout meditation⁵ 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 scorching⁶ sunshine — I fancy Saint Peter of Alcantara, and contrast him with such a personage as the Incumbent⁷ of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel⁸, Mayfair.

His hermitage is situated⁹ in Walpole Street, let us say, on the second floor of a quiet mansion¹⁰, let out to hermits¹¹ by a nobleman’s butler, whose wife takes care of the

分享到：