If hunting, shooting, fishing, croquet, lawn-billiards, bow and arrows, battledore and shuttle-cock, with every other game, as games come up and go, constitute a worldly kind of life, the Babingtons were worldly.

There surely never was a family in which any kind of work was so wholly out of the question, and every amusement so much a matter of course.

But if worldliness and religion are terms opposed to each other, then they were not worldly.
There were always prayers for the whole household morning and evening.
There were two services on Sunday, at the first of which the males, and at both of which the females, were expected to attend.

But the great struggle came after dinner at nine o'clock, when Aunt Polly always read a sermon out loud to the assembled household.

Aunt Polly had a certain power of her own, and no one dared to be absent except the single servant who was left in the kitchen to look after the fire.
The squire himself was always there, but a peculiar chair was placed for him, supposed to be invisible to the reader, in which he slept during the whole time, subject to correction from a neighbouring daughter in the event of his snoring.