other, that there was no mistaking his parentage; but when Mrs Gray
took off the shepherd's-plaid shawl in which the baby was wrapped, such
a little dark head and swarthy face were exposed to view as might have
made intelligent spectators (if there were any in Downside church that
afternoon, which I doubt) reflect on the laws of heredity and reversion
to original types.

'Name this child!'

The clergyman had got successfully through his business with the
roaring George Augustus and the whimpering Alberta Florence, and had
now the little, quiet, brown-faced baby in his arms. Even a young and
unmarried man was fain to confess that it was an unusually pretty
little face that lay against his surplice, with a pointed chin, and
more eyebrows and lashes than most young babies possess, and with dark
eyes that looked up at him with a certain intelligence, recognisable
even to an unprejudiced observer.

'Name this child!'

Mrs Gray had taken advantage of this opportunity to mop her forehead
with her blue and white pocket handkerchief, and wrestle with her
bonnet's unconquerable tendency to slip off behind, and the clergyman
passed the question on to her husband, who fixed his eye on a
bluebottle buzzing in one of the windows, and jerked out what sounded
like 'Joe.'

'I thought it was a girl,' whispered the clergyman. 'Joe, did you say?'

'No, it ain't that 'zactly. Here, 'Liza, can't you tell the gentleman?
You knows best what it be.'

The next attempt sounded like 'Sue,' and the clergyman suggested Susan
as the name, but that would not do.

'Zola' seemed to him, though not a reader of French novels, unsuitable,
and 'Zero,' too, he could not quite appreciate.

'I can't make it out, an outlandish sorter name!' said Gray, with a
terrible inclination to put on his hat in the excitement of the moment,
only checked by a timely nudge from his wife's elbow; 'here, ain't you
got it wrote down somewheres? Can't you show it up?'

And after a lengthened rummage in a voluminous pocket, and the
production of several articles irrelevant to the occasion--a thimble, a
bit of ginger, and part of a tract--Mrs Gray brought to light a piece
of paper, on which was written the name 'Zoe.'

'Zoe, I baptise thee'----

A sudden crash on the organ-pedals followed these words. Mr Robins,
the organist, had, perhaps, been asleep and let his foot slip on to the
pedals, or, perhaps, he had thought there was no wind in the instrument
and th