the background there
came his own figure, a small, pale, excited boy in short trousers.

He was immensely excited--that was the principal thing. It was evening,
the house seemed to swim in candlelight and smoke through which things
could be seen only dimly.

Something wonderful was about to happen to him. He was in a state of
glory, very close to God, so close that he could almost see Him sitting
with His long white beard in the middle of a cloud, watching Martin
with interest and affection. He was pleased with Martin and Martin was
pleased with himself. At the same time as his pleasure he was aware
that the stuff of his new black trousers tickled his knees and that he
was hungry.

He saw his small sister Amy for a moment and expressed quite
effectively by a smile and nod of the head his immeasurable superiority
to her ...

They, he and his father, drove in a cab to the Chapel. Of what followed
then he was now less aware. He remembered that he was in a small room
with two men, that they all took off their clothes (he remembered that
one man, very stout and red, looked funny without his clothes), that
they put on long white night-shirts, that his was too long for him and
that he tripped over it, that they all three walked down the centre of
the Chapel, which was filled with eyes, mouths and boots, and that he
was very conscious of his toe-nails, which had never been exposed in
public before, that they came to a round stone place filled with water
and into this after the two men he was dipped, that he didn't scream
from the coldness, of the water although he wanted to, that he was
wrapped in a blanket and finally carried home in an ecstasy of triumph.

What happiness followed! The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so
that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of God
and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all
been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part.
God had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ever safe and happy.

It was not only that he was assured that when the moment arrived he
would have, in Heaven, a "good time"--it was that he was greatly
exalted, so that he gave his twopence a week pocket-money to his
school-fellows, never pulled Amy's hair, never teased his mother's
canary. He had been aware, young though he was, of another life. He
prayed and prayed, he went to an endless succession of services and
meetings. There w