Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

IN the previous chapter I have dwelt on some of the lighter conditions of our life at this time; I must now turn to it in a less frivolous aspect.  As my tenth year advanced, the development of my character gave my Father, I will not say anxiety, but matter for serious reflection.  My intelligence was now perceived to be taking a sudden start; visitors drew my Father’s attention to the fact that I was ‘coming out so much’.  I grew rapidly in stature, having been a little shrimp of a thing up to that time, and I no longer appeared much younger than my years.  Looking back, I do not think that there was any sudden mental development, but that the change was mainly a social one.  I had been reserved, timid and taciturn; I had disliked the company of strangers.  But with my tenth year, I certainly unfolded, so far as to become sociable and talkative, and perhaps I struck those around me as grown ‘clever’, because I said the things which I had previously only thought.  There was a change, no doubt, yet I believe that it was mainly physical, rather than mental.  My excessive fragility—­or apparent fragility, for I must have been always wiry—­decreased; I slept better, and therefore, grew less nervous; I ate better, and therefore put on flesh.  If I preserved a delicate look—­people still used to say in my presence, ’That dear child is not long for this world!’—­it was in consequence of a sort of habit into which my body had grown; it was a transparency which did not speak of what was in store for me, but of what I had already passed through.

The increased activity of my intellectual system now showed itself in what I behove to be a very healthy form, direct imitation.  The rage for what is called ‘originality’ is pushed to such a length in these days that even children are not considered promising, unless they attempt things preposterous and unparalleled.  From his earliest hour, the ambitious person is told that to make a road where none has walked before, to do easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create new forms of thought and expression, are the only recipes for genius; and in trying to escape on all sides from every resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness.  This continues to be the accepted view of originality; but, in spite of this conventional opinion, I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of mind in early youth is not to be striving after unheard-of miracles, but to imitate closely and carefully what is being said and done in the vicinity.  The child of a great sculptor will hang about the studio, and will try to hammer a head out of a waste piece of marble with a nail; it does not follow that he too will be a sculptor.  The child of a politician will sit in committee with a row of empty chairs, and will harangue an imaginary senate from behind the curtains.  I, the son of a man who looked through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fair observe for myself, and paint my observations.  It did not follow, alas! that I was built to be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand.

In the secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those which my Father was composing for his Actinologia Britannica.  I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations.  One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved, and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of close and persistent labour.  I was not set to these tasks by my Father, who, in fact, did not much approve of them.  He was touched, too, with the ‘originality’ heresy, and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and describe something new, in a new way.  That was quite impossible; I possessed no initiative.  But I can now well understand why my Father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine.  They took up, and, as he might well think, wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings, for I invented new species, with sapphire spots and crimson tentacles and amber bands, which were close enough to his real species to be disconcerting.  He came from conscientiously shepherding the flocks of ocean, and I do not wonder that my ring-straked, speckled and spotted varieties put him out of countenance.  If I had not been so innocent and solemn, he might have fancied I was mocking him.

These extraordinary excursions into science, falsely so called, occupied a large part of my time.  There was a little spare room at the back of our house, dedicated to lumber and to empty portmanteaux.  There was a table in it already, and I added a stool; this cheerless apartment now became my study.  I spent so many hours here, in solitude and without making a sound, that my Father’s curiosity, if not his suspicion, was occasionally aroused, and he would make a sudden raid on me.  I was always discovered, doubled up over the table, with my pen and ink, or else my box of colours and tumbler of turbid water by my hand, working away like a Chinese student shut up in his matriculating box.

It might have been done for a wager, if anything so simple had ever been dreamed of in our pious household.  The apparatus was slow and laboured.  In order to keep my uncouth handwriting in bounds, I was obliged to rule not lines only, but borders to my pages.  The subject did not lend itself to any flow of language, and I was obliged incessantly to borrow sentences, word for word, from my Father’s published books.  Discouraged by everyone around me, daunted by the laborious effort needful to carry out the scheme, it seems odd to me now that I persisted in so strange and wearisome an employment, but it became an absorbing passion, and was indulged in to the neglect of other lessons and other pleasures.

My Father, as the spring advanced, used to come up to the Boxroom, as my retreat was called, and hunt me out into the sunshine.  But I soon crept back to my mania.  It gave him much trouble, and Miss Marks, who thought it sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection.  She would gladly have torn up all my writings and paintings, and have set me to a useful task.  My Father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take this view.  He was interested in this strange freak of mine, and he could not wholly condemn it.  But he must have thought is a little crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution in domestic policy by which he began to encourage any acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously discouraged it.  He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society.  He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature-painting as applied to natural history.  I was forced, in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs, and paint under my Father’s eye, and, from a finished drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird in flight.  Aided by my habit of imitation, I did at length produce some thing which might have shown promise, if it had not been wrung from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment, under the orders of a task-master.

All this had its absurd side, but I seem to perceive that it had also its value.  It is, surely, a mistake to look too near at hand for the benefits of education.  What is actually taught in early childhood is often that part of training which makes least impression on the character, and is of the least permanent importance.  My labours failed to make me a zoologist, and the multitude of my designs and my descriptions have left me helplessly ignorant of the anatomy of a sea-anemone.  Yet I cannot look upon the mental discipline as useless.  It taught me to concentrate my attention, to define the nature of distinctions, to see accurately, and to name what I saw.  Moreover, it gave me the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not flagging because the interest or picturesqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing forth towards a definite goal, well foreseen and limited beforehand.  For almost any intellectual employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was valuable.  I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was the mode in which, in my tenth year, I obtained it.

My spiritual condition occupied my Father’s thoughts very insistently at this time.  Closing, as he did, most of the doors of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any sense of sin.  Most fortunate it was, that the collecting of marine animals in the tidal pools, and the description of them in pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public, at no time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy calling.  His conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid in its delicacy, that if that had occurred to him, he would certainly have abandoned his investigations, and have been left without an employment.  But happily he justified his investigation by regarding it as a glorification of God’s created works.  In the introduction of his Actinologia Britannica, written at the time which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his labours with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in connection with a learned and technical biological treatise.  He stated, concerning that book, that he published it ’as one more tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune God, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working’.  Scientific investigation sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays.

The development of my faculties, of which I have spoken, extended to the religious sphere no less than to the secular, Here, also, as I look back, I see that I was extremely imitative.  I expanded in the warmth of my Father’s fervour, and, on the whole, in a manner that was satisfactory to him.  He observed the richer hold that I was now taking on life; he saw my faculties branching in many directions, and he became very anxious to secure my maintenance in grace.  In earlier years, certain sides of my character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas.  I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receiving impressions—­blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they cannot achieve by argument.  I think that I had frequently done this; that he had been brought up against a dead wall; although on other sides of my nature I had been responsive and docile.  But now, in my tenth year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand, and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what I was expected to be.  If there was a doubt now, it lay in the other direction; it seemed hardly normal that so young a child should appear so receptive and so apt.

My Father believed himself justified, at this juncture, in making a tremendous effort.  He wished to secure me finally, exhaustively, before the age of puberty could dawn, before my soul was fettered with the love of carnal things.  He thought that if I could now be identified with the ‘saints’, and could stand on exactly their footing, a habit of conformity would be secured.  I should meet the paganizing tendencies of advancing years with security if I could be forearmed with all the weapons of a sanctified life.  He wished me, in short, to be received into the community of the Brethren on the terms of an adult.  There were difficulties in the way of carrying out this scheme, and they were urged upon him, more or less courageously, by the elders of the church.  But he overbore them.  What the difficulties were, and what were the arguments which he used to sweep those difficulties away, I must now explain, for in this lay the centre of our future relations as father and son.

In dealing with the peasants around him, among whom he was engaged in an active propaganda, my Father always insisted on the necessity of conversion.  There must be a new birth and being, a fresh creation in God.  This crisis he was accustomed to regard as manifesting itself in a sudden and definite upheaval.  There might have been prolonged practical piety, deep and true contrition for sin, but these, although the natural and suitable prologue to conversion, were not conversion itself.  People hung on at the confines of regeneration, often for a very long time; my Father dealt earnestly with them, the elders ministered to them, with explanation, exhortation and prayer.  Such persons were in a gracious state, but they were not in a state of grace.  If they should suddenly die, they would pass away in an unconverted condition, and all that could be said in their favour was a vague expression of hope that they would benefit from God’s uncovenanted mercies.

But on some day, at some hour and minute, if life was spared to them, the way of salvation would be revealed to these persons in such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to accept it.  They would take it consciously, as one takes a gift from the hand that offers it.  This act of taking was the process of conversion, and the person who so accepted was a child of God now, although a single minute ago he had been a child of wrath.  The very root of human nature had to be changed, and, in the majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable.

I have just said, ‘in the majority of cases’, because my Father admitted the possibility of exceptions.  The formula was, ’If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’  As a rule, no one could possess the Spirit of Christ, without a conscious and full abandonment of the soul, and this, however carefully led up to, and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was not, could not, be made, except at a set moment of time.  Faith, in an esoteric and almost symbolic sense, was necessary, and could not be a result of argument, but was a state of heart.  In these opinions my Father departed in no ways from the strict evangelical doctrine of the Protestant churches, but he held it in a mode and with a severity peculiar to himself.  Now, it is plain that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of acceptance, presupposed a full and rational consciousness of the relations of things.  It might be clearly achieved by a person of humble cultivation, but only by one who was fully capable of independent thought, in other words by a more or less adult person, The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious education was aiming at.

It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave my Father to know whether he was justified in admitting to the communion people of very limited powers of expression.  A harmless, humble labouring man would come with a request—­to be allowed to ‘break bread’.  It was only by the use of strong leading questions that he could be induced to mention Christ as the ground of his trust at all.  I recollect an elderly agricultural labourer being closeted for a long time with my Father, who came out at last, in a sort of dazed condition, and replied to our inquiries,—­with a shrug of his shoulders as he said it,—­’I was obliged to put the Name and Blood and Work of Jesus into his very mouth.  It is true that he assented cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously daunted by the poor intelligence!’

But there was, or there might be, another class of persona, whom early training, separation from the world, and the care of godly parents had so early familiarized with the acceptable calling of Christ that their conversion had occurred, unperceived and therefore unrecorded, at an extraordinarily earl age.  It would be in vain to look for a repetition of the phenomenon in those cases.  The heavenly fire must not be expected to descend a second time; the lips are touched with the burning coal once, and once only.  If, accordingly, these precociously selected spirits are to be excluded because no new birth is observed in them at a mature age, they must continue outside in the cold, since the phenomenon cannot be repeated.  When, therefore, there is not possible any further doubt of their being in possession of salvation, longer delay is useless, and worse than useless.  The fact of conversion, though not recorded nor even recollected, must be accepted on the evidence of confession of faith, and as soon as the intelligence is evidently developed, the person not merely may, but should be accepted into communion, although still immature in body, although in years still even a child.  This my Father believed to be my case, and in this rare class did he fondly persuade himself to station me.

As I have said, the congregation,—­although docile and timid, and little able, as units, to hold their own against their minister—­ behind his back were faintly hostile to this plan.  None of their own children had ever been so much as suggested for membership, and each of themselves, in ripe years, had been subjected to severe cross-examination.  I think it was rather a bitter pill for some of them to swallow that a pert little boy of ten should be admitted, as a grown-up person, to all the hard-won privileges of their order.  Mary Grace Burmington came back from her visits to the cottagers, reporting disaffection here and there, grumblings in the rank and file.  But quite as many, especially of the women, enthusiastically supported my Father’s wish, gloried aloud in the manifestations of my early piety, and professed to see in it something of miraculous promise.  The expression ’another Infant Samuel’ was widely used.  I became quite a subject of contention.  A war of the sexes threatened to break out over me; I was a disturbing element at cottage breakfasts.  I was mentioned at public prayer-meetings, not indeed by name but, in the extraordinary allusive way customary in our devotions, as ’one amongst us of tender years’ or as ’a sapling in the Lord’s vineyard’.

To all this my Father put a stop in his own high-handed fashion.  After the morning meeting, one Sunday in the autumn of 1859, he desired the attention of the Saints to a personal matter which was, perhaps, not unfamiliar to them by rumour.  That was, he explained, the question of the admission of his, beloved little son to the communion of saints in the breaking of bread.  He allowed—­and I sat there in evidence, palely smiling at the audience, my feet scarcely touching the ground—­that I was not what is styled adult; I was not, he frankly admitted, a grown-up person.  But I was adult in a knowledge of the Lord; I possessed an insight into the plan of salvation which many a hoary head might envy for its fullness, its clearness, its conformity with Scripture doctrine.  This was a palpable hit at more than one stumbler and fumbler after the truth, and several hoary heads were bowed.

My Father then went on to explain very fully the position which I have already attempted to define.  He admitted the absence in my case of a sudden, apparent act of conversion resulting upon conviction of sin.  But he stated the grounds of his belief that I had, in still earlier infancy, been converted, and he declared that if so, I ought no longer to be excluded from the privileges of communion.  He said, moreover, that he was willing on this occasion to waive his own privilege as a minister, and that he would rather call on Brother Fawkes and Brother Bere, the leading elders, to examine the candidate in his stead.  This was a master-stroke, for Brothers Fawkes and Bere had been suspected of leading the disaffection, and this threw all the burden of responsibility on them.  The meeting broke up in great amiability, and my Father and I went home together in the very highest of spirits.  I, indeed, in my pride, crossed the verge of indiscretion by saying:  ’When I have been admitted to fellowship, Papa, shall I be allowed to call you “beloved Brother”?’ My Father was too well pleased with the morning’s work to be critical.  He laughed, and answered:  ’That, my Love, though strictly correct, would hardly, I fear, be thought judicious!’

It was suggested that my tenth birthday, which followed this public announcement by a few days, would be a capital occasion for me to go through the ordeal.  Accordingly, after dark (for our new lamp was lighted for the first time in honour of the event), I withdrew alone into our drawing-room, which had just, at length, been furnished, and which looked, I thought, very smart.  Hither came to me, first Brother Fawkes, by himself; then Brother Bere, by himself; and then both together, so that you may say, if you are pedanticaly inclined, that I underwent three successive interviews.  My Father, out of sight somewhere, was, of course, playing the part of stage manager.

I felt not at all shy, but so highly strung that my whole nature seemed to throb with excitement.  My first examiner, on the other hand, was extremely confused.  Fawkes, who was a builder in a small business of his own, was short and fat; his complexion, which wore a deeper and more uniform rose-colour than usual, I observed to be starred with dew-drops of nervous emotion, which he wiped away at intervals with a large bandana handkerchief.  He was so long in coming to the point, that I was obliged to lead him to it myself, and I sat up on the sofa in the full lamplight, and testified my faith in the atonement with a fluency that surprised myself.  Before I had done, Fawkes, a middle-aged man with the reputation of being a very stiff employer of labour, was weeping like a child.

Bere, the carpenter, a long, thin and dry man, with a curiously immobile eye, did not fall so easily a prey to my fascinations.  He put me through my paces very sharply, for he had something of the temper of an attorney mingled with his religiousness.  However, I was equal to him, and he, too, though he held his own head higher, was not less impressed than Fawkes had been, by the surroundings of the occasion.  Neither of them had ever been in our drawing-room since it was furnished, and I thought that each of them noticed how smart the wallpaper was.  Indeed, I believe I drew their attention to it.  After the two solitary examinations were over, the elders came in again, as I have said, and they prayed for a long time.  We all three knelt at the sofa, I between them.  But by this time, to my great exaltation of spirits there had succeeded an equally dismal depression.  It was my turn now to weep, and I dimly remember any Father coming into the room, and my being carried up to bed, in a state of collapse and fatigue, by the silent and kindly Miss Marks.

On the following Sunday morning, I was the principal subject which occupied an unusually crowded meeting.  My Father, looking whiter and yet darker than usual, called upon Brother Fawkes and Brother Bere to state to the assembled saints what their experiences had been in connexion with their visits to ‘one’ who desired to be admitted to the breaking of bread.  It was tremendously exciting to me to hear myself spoken of with this impersonal publicity, and I had no fear of the result.

Events showed that I had no need of fear.  Fawkes and Bere were sometimes accused of a rivalry, which indeed broke out a few years later, and gave my Father much anxiety and pain.  But on this occasion their unanimity was wonderful.  Each strove to exceed the other in the tributes which they paid to any piety.  My answers had been so full and clear, my humility (save the mark!) had been so sweet, my acquaintance with Scripture so amazing, my testimony to all the leading principles of salvation so distinct and exhaustive, that they could only say that they had felt confounded, and yet deeply cheered and led far along their own heavenly path, by hearing such accents fall from the lips of a babe and a suckling.  I did not like being described as a suckling, but every lot has its crumpled rose-leaf, and in all other respects the report of the elders was a triumph.  My Father then clenched the whole matter by rising and announcing that I had expressed an independent desire to confess the Lord by the act of public baptism, immediately after which I should be admitted to communion ‘as an adult’.  Emotion ran so high at this, that a large portion of the congregation insisted on walking with us back to our garden-gate, to the stupefaction of the rest of the villagers.

My public baptism was the central event of my whole childhood.  Everything, since the earliest dawn of consciousness, seemed to have been leading up to it.  Everything, afterwards, seemed to be leading down and away from it.  The practice of immersing communicants on the sea-beach at Oddicombe had now been completely abandoned, but we possessed as yet no tank for a baptismal purpose in our own Room.  The Room in the adjoining town, however, was really quite a large chapel, and it was amply provided with the needful conveniences.  It was our practice, therefore, at this time, to claim the hospitality of our neighbours.  Baptisms were made an occasion for friendly relations between the two congregations, and led to pleasant social intercourse.  I believe that the ministers and elders of the two meetings arranged 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.  She sat there perfectly listless, looking at nothing, but chewing between her toothless gums what appeared to be a jujube.

In the centre of the chapel-floor a number of planks had been taken up and revealed a pool which might have been supposed to be a small swimming-bath.  We gazed down into this dark square of mysterious waters, from the tepid surface of which faint swirls of vapour rose.  The whole congregation was arranged, tier above tier, about the four straight sides of this pool; every person was able to see what happened in it without any unseemly struggling or standing on forms.  Mr. S. now rose, an impressive hieratic figure, commanding attention and imploring perfect silence.  He held a small book in his hand, and he was preparing to give out the number of a hymn, when an astounding incident took place.

There was a great splash, and a tall young woman was perceived to be in the baptismal pool, her arms waving above her head, and her figure held upright in the water by the inflation of the air underneath her crinoline which was blown out like a bladder, as in some extravagant old fashion-plate.  Whether her feet touched the bottom of the font I cannot say, but I suppose they did so.  An indescribable turmoil of shrieks and cries followed on this extraordinary apparition.  A great many people excitedly called upon other people to be calm, and an instance was given of the remark of James Smith that

  He who, in quest of quiet, ‘Silence!’ hoots
  Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.

The young woman, in a more or less fainting condition, was presently removed from the water, and taken into the sort of tent which was prepared for candidates.  It was found that she herself had wished to be a candidate and had earnestly desired to be baptized, but that this had been forbidden by her parents.  On the supposition that she fell in by accident, a pious coincidence was detected in this affair; the Lord had pre-ordained that she should be baptized in spite of all opposition.  But my Father, in his shrewd way, doubted.  He pointed out to us, next morning, that, in the first place, she had not, in any sense, been baptized, as her head had not been immersed; and that, in the second place, she must have deliberately jumped in, since, had she stumbled and fallen forward, her hands and face would have struck the water, whereas they remained quite dry.  She belonged, however, to the neighbour congregation, and we had no responsibility to pursue the inquiry any further.

Decorum being again secured, Mr. S., with unimpaired dignity, proposed to the congregation a hymn, which was long enough to occupy them during the preparations for the actual baptism.  He then retired to the vestry, and I (for I was to be the first to testify) was led by Miss Marks and Mary Grace into the species of tent of which I have just spoken.  Its pale sides seemed to shake with the jubilant singing of the saints outside, while part of my clothing was removed and I was prepared for immersion.  A sudden cessation of the hymn warned us that to Minister was now ready, and we emerged into the glare of lights and faces to find Mr. S. already standing in the water up to his knees.  Feeling as small as one of our microscopical specimens, almost infinitesimally tiny as I descended into his Titanic arms, I was handed down the steps to him.  He was dressed in a kind of long surplice, underneath which—­as I could not, even in that moment, help observing—­the air gathered in long bubbles which he strove to flatten out.  The end of his noble beard he had tucked away; his shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrist.

The entire congregation was now silent, so silent that the uncertain splashing of my feet as I descended seemed to deafen one.  Mr. S., a little embarrassed by my short stature, succeeded at length in securing me with one palm on my chest and the other between my shoulders.  He said, slowly, in a loud, sonorous voice that seemed to enter my brain and empty it, ’I baptize thee, my Brother, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!’ Having intoned this formula, he then gently flung me backwards until I was wholly under the water, and then—­as he brought me up again, and tenderly steadied my feet on the steps of the font, and delivered me, dripping and spluttering, into the anxious hands of the women, who hurried me to the tent—­the whole assembly broke forth in a thunder of song, a paean of praise to God for this manifestation of his marvellous goodness and mercy.  So great was the enthusiasm, that it could hardly be restrained so as to allow the other candidates, the humdrum adults who followed in my wet and glorious footsteps, to undergo a ritual about which, in their case, no one in the congregation pretended to be able to take even the most languid interest.

My Father’s happiness during the next few weeks it is not pathetic to me to look back upon.  His sternness melted into a universal complaisance.  He laughed and smiled, he paid to my opinions the tribute of the gravest considerations, he indulged—­ utterly unlike his wont—­in shy and furtive caresses.  I could express no wish that he did not attempt to fulfill, and the only warning which he cared to give me was one, very gently expressed, against spiritual pride.

This was certainly required, for I was puffed out with a sense of my own holiness.  I was religiously confidential with my Father, condescending with Miss Marks (who I think had given up trying to make it all out), haughty with the servants, and insufferably patronizing with those young companions of my own age with whom I was now beginning to associate.

I would fain close this remarkable episode on a key of solemnity, but alas!  If I am to be loyal to the truth, I must record that some of the other little boys presently complained to Mary Grace that I put out my tongue at them in mockery, during the service in the Room, to remind them that I now broke bread as one of the Saints and that they did not.