appeal to the public sense of the higher officials of the Church of England.

Nor was the result ungratifying, as various letters still in my possession go to prove. Though unable, owing to so many similar and previously acquired obligations, to accede to my father’s suggestion, all of them replied with the greatest courtesy. Thus the Dean of St. Paul’s wrote in person wishing me every success in life; the Bishop of London trusted that my father’s aspirations as to my personal holiness would be realized; while the Archbishop of Canterbury commanded his secretary to express his gratification at the suggestion of an honour that only the exigencies of his position as Primate forbade him to accept. Needless to say, those in charge of the State, whom my father next approached, behaved very differently. Neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Secretary saw fit to reply at all, while the President of the Board of Trade merely expressed a formal regret. And yet in the end, as is so often the case, the solution proved quite a simple one. Turn but a stone, says a poet, and start a wing. And my father did not even need to turn a stone. Sick at heart, he was returning home one night when he suddenly caught sight of himself in a cheesemonger’s window. It was as though Providence, he said, had touched him on the shoulder. Whereas he had been blind, he said, then he saw. For a moment the shock was almost too much for him. A member of the constabulary, indeed, actually asked him to move on. But the solution was there, staring him in the face. Involuntarily he raised his hat. He himself was the man.

With my aunt, Mrs. Emily Smith, only too eager to be my godmother, everything now seemed to be propitious for the happy consummation of my baptism, and no more earnest or reverent gathering could have been found that day in any metropolitan church. The vicar being godfather, the actual ceremony was, at my father’s suggestion, performed by the senior curate, the junior curate, in deference to my father’s position as sidesman, being on the vicar’s right hand between him and my mother.

On the senior curate’s left stood my father, flanked on his own left by the verger, the circle round the font being completed by Mrs. Emily Smith, my mother’s mother, my mother’s father, her eight sisters and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs. A soft April rain was refreshing the outside world, and the first part of the service had been successfully performed, when an incident occurred that might well have been attended with the most tragic and irreparable consequences. For there suddenly took place, just as I 

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