to a hired servant the composition of laborious chapters.

So he took his responsibility gravely. This was partly due to
the christening service, perhaps, which had gone off very
charmingly. It had not been without its embarrassments. None of
the neighbouring ladies would stand as godmother, for they were
secretly dubious as to the children's origin; so he had asked
good Mrs. Spaniel to act in that capacity. She, a simple kindly
creature, was much flattered, though certainly she can have
understood very little of the symbolical rite. Gissing, filling
out the form that Mr. Poodle had given him, had put down the
names of an entirely imaginary brother and sister-in-law of his,
"deceased," whom he asserted as the parents. He had been so busy
with preparations that he did not find time, before the
ceremony, to study the text of the service; and when he and Mrs.
Spaniel stood beneath the font with an armful of ribboned
infancy, he was frankly startled by the magnitude of the
promises exacted from him. He found that, on behalf of the
children, he must "renounce the devil and all his work, the vain
pomp and glory of the world;" that he must pledge himself to see
that these infants would "crucify the old man and utterly
abolish the whole body of sin." It was rather doubtful whether
they would do so, he reflected, as he felt them squirming in his
arms while Mrs. Spaniel was busy trying to keep their socks on.
When the curate exhorted him "to follow the innocency" of these
little ones, it was disconcerting to have one of them burst into
a piercing yammer, and wriggle so forcibly that it slipped quite
out of its little embroidered shift and flannel band. But the
actual access to the holy basin was more seemly, perhaps due to
the children imagining they were going to find tadpoles there.