nged to combine their forces at these times, and to
baptize communicants from both congregations.

The minister of the town meeting was Mr. S., a very handsome old
gentleman, of venerable and powerful appearance. He had snowy
hair and a long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows there
blazed out great black eyes which warned the beholder that the
snow was an ornament and not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my
baptism at length drew near; it was fixed for October 12, almost
exactly three weeks after my tenth birthday. I was dressed in old
clothes, and a suit of smarter things was packed up in a carpet-
bag. After nightfall, this carpet-bag, accompanied by my Father,
myself, Miss Marks and Mary Grace, was put in a four-wheeled cab,
and driven, a long way in the dark, to the chapel of our friends.
There we were received, in a blaze of lights, with a pressure of
hands, with a murmur of voices, with ejaculations and even with
tears, and were conducted, amid unspeakable emotion, to places of
honour in the front row of the congregation.

The scene was one which would have been impressive, not merely to
such hermits as we were, but even to worldly persons accustomed
to life and to its curious and variegated experiences. To me it
was dazzling beyond words, inexpressibly exciting, an initiation
to every kind of publicity and glory. There were many candidates,
but the rest of them,--mere grownup men and women,--gave thanks
aloud that it was their privilege to follow where I led. I was
the acknowledged hero of the hour. Those were days when newspaper
enterprise was scarcely in its infancy, and the event owed
nothing to journalistic effort; in spite of that, the news of
this remarkable ceremony, the immersion of a little boy of ten
years old 'as an adult', had spread far and wide through the
county in the course of three weeks. The chapel of our hosts was,
as I have said, very large; it was commonly too large for their
needs, but on this night it was crowded to the ceiling, and the
crowd had come--as every soft murmur assured me--to see _me_.

There were people there who had travelled from Exeter, from
Dartmouth, from Totnes, to witness so extraordinary a ceremony.
There was one old woman of eighty-five who had come, my
neighbours whispered to me, all the way from Moreton-Hampstead,
on purpose to see me baptized. I looked at her crumpled
countenance with amazement, for there was no curiosity, no
interest visible in it.