The head-gardener was a Scotch Calvinist, after the strictest order, only occupying himself with the melons and pines provisionally, and until the end of the world, which event he could prove by infallible calculations was to come off in two or three years at farthest. Wherefore, he asked, should the butler brew strong ale to be drunken three years hence; or the housekeeper (a follower of Joanna Southcote) make provisions of fine linen and lay up stores of jams? On a Sunday (which good old Saxon word was scarcely known at the Hermitage), the household marched away in separate couples or groups to at least half a dozen of religious edifices, each to sit under his or her favourite minister, the only man who went to church being Thomas Newcome, accompanied by Tommy, his little son, and Sarah his nurse, who was, I believe, also his aunt, or at least his mother's first cousin. Tommy was taught hymns very soon after he could speak, appropriate to his tender age, pointing out to him the inevitable fate of wicked children, and giving him the earliest possible warning and description of the punishment of little sinners. He repeated these poems to his step-mother after dinner, before a great, shining mahogany table covered with grapes, pine-apples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded by stout men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took the little man between their knees, and questioned him as to his right understanding of the place whither naughty boys were bound. They patted his head with their fat hands if he said well, or rebuked him if he was bold, as he often was.

Nurse Sarah or Aunt Sarah would have died had she remained many years in that stifling garden of Eden. She could not bear to part from the child whom her mistress and kinswoman had confided to her (the women had worked in the same room at Newcome's, and loved each other always, when Susan became a merchant's lady and Sarah her servant). She was nobody in the pompous new household but Master Tommy's nurse. The honest soul never mentioned her relationship to the boy's mother, nor indeed did Mr. Newcome acquaint his new family with that circumstance. The housekeeper called her an Erastian; Mrs. Newcome's own serious maid informed against her for telling Tommy stories of Lancashire witches, and believing in the same. The black footman (Madam's maid and the butler were of course privately united) persecuted her with his addresses, and was even encouraged by his mistress, who thought of sending him as a missionary to the Niger. No little love, and fidelity, and constancy did honest Sarah show and use during the years she passed at the Hermitage, and until Tommy went to school. Her master, with many private prayers and entreaties, in which he passionately recalled his former wife's memory and affection, implored his friend to stay with him; and Tommy's fondness for her and artless caresses, and the scrapes he got into, and the howls he uttered over the hymns and catechisms which he was bidden to learn (by Rev. T. Clack, of Highbury College, his daily tutor, who was commissioned to spare not the rod, neither to spoil the child), – all these causes induced Sarah to remain with her young master until such time as he was sent to school.

Meanwhile an event of prodigious importance, a wonderment, a blessing and a delight, had happened at the Hermitage. About two years after Mrs. Newcome's marriage, the lady being then forty-three years of age, no less than two little cherubs appeared in the Clapham Paradise – the twins, Hobson Newcome and Brian Newcome, called after their uncle and late grandfather, whose name and rank they were destined to perpetuate. And now there was no reason why young Newcome should not go to school. Old Mr. Hobson and his brother had been educated at that school of Grey Friars, of which mention has been made in former works; and to Grey Friars Thomas Newcome was accordingly sent, exchanging – O ye gods! with what delight – the splendour of Clapham for the rough, plentiful fare of the place, blacking his master's shoes with perfect readiness, till he rose in the school, and the time came when he should have a fag of his own – tibbing out and receiving the penalty therefor; bartering a black eye, per bearer, against a bloody nose drawn at sight, with a schoolfellow, and shaking hands the next day; playing at cricket, hockey, prisoners' base, and football, according to the season, and gorging himself and friends with tarts when he had money (and of this he had plenty) to spend. I have seen his name carved upon the Gown Boys' arch: but he was at school long before my time; his son showed me the name when we were boys together, in some year when George the Fourth was king.

The pleasures of this school-life were such to Tommy Newcome, that he did not care to go home for a holiday; and indeed, by insubordination and boisterousness – by playing tricks and breaking windows, by marauding upon the gardener's peaches and the housekeeper's jam, by upsetting his two little brothers in a go-cart (of which wanton and careless injury the Baronet's nose bore marks to his dying day), by going to sleep during the sermons, and treating reverend gentlemen with levity – he drew down on himself the merited wrath of his step-mother, and many punishments in this present life, besides those of a future and much more durable kind which the good lady did not fail to point out that he must undoubtedly inherit. His father, at Mrs. Newcome's instigation, certainly whipped Tommy for upsetting his little brothers in the go-cart; but upon being pressed to repeat the whipping for some other peccadillo performed soon after, Mr. Newcome refused at once, using a wicked, worldly expression which well might shock any serious lady – saying, in fact, that he would be deed if he beat the boy any more, and that he got flogging enough at school, in which opinion Master Tommy fully coincided.

The undaunted woman, his step-mother, was not to be made to forego her plans for the boy's reform by any such vulgar ribaldries; and Mr. Newcome being absent in the City on his business, and Tommy refractory as usual, she summoned the serious butler and the black footman (for the lashings of whose brethren she felt an unaffected pity) to operate together in the chastisement of this young criminal. But he dashed so furiously against the butler's shins as to draw blood from his comely limbs, and to cause that serious and overfed menial to limp and suffer for many days after; and seizing the decanter, he swore he would demolish blackey's ugly face with it – nay, he threatened to discharge it at Mrs. Newcome's own head, before he would submit to the coercion which she desired her agents to administer.

High words took place between Mr. and Mrs. Newcome that night on the gentleman's return home from the City, and on his learning the events of the morning.