Ten years! Ten times three hundred and sixty-five days! All the days of the years of my life.
The weight of that undeserved punishment had fallen on him the year that I was born, and all that long, long time of home with Mother and Father and Jem--all the haymaking summers and snowballing winters--whilst Jem and I had never been away from home, and had had so much fun, and nothing very horrid that I could call to mind except the mumps--he had been an exile working in chains.

I remember rousing up with a start from the realization of this one Sunday to find myself still standing in the middle of the Litany.

My mother was behaving too well herself to find me out, and though Jem was giggling he dared not move, because he was kneeling next my father, whose back was turned to me.

I knelt down, and started to hear the parson say--"show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives!" And then I knew what it is to wish when it is too late.

For I did so wish I had really prayed for prisoners and captives every Sunday, because then I should have prayed for that poor man nearly all the long time he had been so miserable; for we began to go to church very early, and one learns to pray easier and sooner than one learns anything else.
All this had happened in the holidays, but when they were over school opened as before, and with additional scholars; for sympathy was wide and warm with the school-mistress.