with just the
same pleasure. Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing from
what it is to us. The Dean and Mr. Gingham used often to speak of it as
they walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis.
And when your Sunday walk is to your wife's grave, as the Dean's was,
perhaps it seems different to anybody.

The Church of England Church, I said; stood close to the rectory, a
tall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar beams
that ran to the point of the roof. There used to stand on the same spot
the little stone church that all the grown-up people in Mariposa still
remember, a quaint little building in red and grey stone. About it was
the old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out later into the grass
plot round the new church, and the headstones laid out flat, and no new
graves have been put there for ever so long. But the Mariposa children
still walk round and read the headstones lying flat in the grass and
look for the old ones,--because some of them are ever so old--forty or
fifty years back.

Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man with
serious perplexities. You could easily convince yourself of the
contrary. For if you watched the Rev. Mr. Drone as he sat reading in the
Greek, you would notice that no very long period every passed without
his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of the
Theocritus and that were covered close with figures.

And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would add
them up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then down
it to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again to see
what it was that must have been left out.

Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean's forte. They never
were the forte of the men who had been trained at the little Anglican
college with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground, where Rupert
Drone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years ago. You will
see the medal at any time lying there in its open box on the rectory
table, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone girls, Lilian, or
Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as I say, mathematics
were not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it (in a Christian
spirit, you will understand) the memory of his mathematical professor,
and often he spoke with great bitterness. I have often heard him say
that in his opinion the colleges ought