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.