um blossoms
fluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr. Gallagher's
hair.

I don't want you to suppose that the Rev. Mr. Drone spent the whole of
his time under the trees. Not at all. In point of fact, the rector's
life was one round of activity which lie himself might deplore but was
powerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of an
afternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the Infant Class at
three, and after that, with scarcely an hour between, the Mothers'
Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club, and that evening
the Bible Study Class, and the next morning the Early Workers' Guild at
eleven-thirty. The whole week was like that, and if one found time to
sit down for an hour or so to recuperate it was the most one could do.
After all, if a busy man spends the little bit of leisure that he gets
in advanced classical study, there is surely no harm in it. I suppose,
take it all in all, there wasn't a busier man than the Rural Dean among
the Anglican clergy of the diocese.

If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he spent
it in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not, instead of
taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusing
the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys and
clockwork steamboats for them.

It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest and
aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this
kind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition. But the Rev.
Mr. Drone had a curious liking for machinery. I think I never heard him
preach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now see you
on high Jeremiah Two).

So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wings
for Teddy Moore, the photographer's son, and closed down the infant
class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss the
pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown. It is foolish to trust
a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.

In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie
Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allow
the afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things that Mr.
Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he was making
the sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) the
Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child