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.