man interest that the numerous minsters and
churches knee-deep in fresh green grass, visited by him during the
foregoing week, had often lacked. Moreover, there was going to be a
baptism: that meant the immersion of a grown-up person; and he had
been told that Baptists were serious people and that the scene was most
impressive. What manner of man would it be who on an ordinary plodding
and bustling evening of the nineteenth century could single himself out
as one different from the rest of the inhabitants, banish all shyness,
and come forward to undergo such a trying ceremony? Who was he that
had pondered, gone into solitudes, wrestled with himself, worked up his
courage and said, I will do this, though few else will, for I believe it
to be my duty?

Whether on account of these thoughts, or from the circumstance that
he had been alone amongst the tombs all day without communion with his
kind, he could not tell in after years (when he had good reason to think
of the subject); but so it was that Somerset went back, and again stood
under the chapel-wall.

Instead of entering he passed round to where the stove-chimney came
through the bricks, and holding on to the iron stay he put his toes on
the plinth and looked in at the window. The building was quite full of
people belonging to that vast majority of society who are denied the
art of articulating their higher emotions, and crave dumbly for a
fugleman--respectably dressed working people, whose faces and forms were
worn and contorted by years of dreary toil. On a platform at the end
of the chapel a haggard man of more than middle age, with grey whiskers
ascetically cut back from the fore part of his face so far as to be
almost banished from the countenance, stood reading a chapter. Between
the minister and the congregation was an open space, and in the floor of
this was sunk a tank full of water, which just made its surface visible
above the blackness of its depths by reflecting the lights overhead.

Somerset endeavoured to discover which one among the assemblage was to
be the subject of the ceremony. But nobody appeared there who was at all
out of the region of commonplace. The people were all quiet and settled;
yet he could discern on their faces something more than attention,
though it was less than excitement: perhaps it was expectation. And as
if to bear out his surmise he heard at that moment the noise of wheels
behind him.

His gaze into the lighted chapel made