" she had declared.

Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about
a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been
corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora
about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery
stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:"
Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity,
had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense
tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed
in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Caesar
landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was
asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had
landed.

"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."

It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies
huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.

But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were
the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter
whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not
matter you were able to remember so much more easily. He could have
listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their
pods when the donkey was trotting with the boy Christ and His mother and
St. Joseph far away from cruel Herod into Egypt and how the noise of the
rattling seeds nearly betrayed their flight and how the plant was cursed
for evermore and made as hungry as a wolf. And the story of how the
robin tried to loosen one of the cruel nails so that the blood from the
poor Saviour drenched his breast and stained it red for evermore, and of
that other bird, the crossbill, who pecked at the nails until his beak
became crossed. He could listen for ever to the tale of St. Cuthbert who
was fed by ravens, of St. Martin who cut off his cloak and gave it to a
beggar, of St. Anthony who preached to the fishes, of St. Raymond who
put up his cowl and floated from Spain to Africa like a nautilus, of St.
Nicolas who raised three boys from the dead after they had been killed
and cut up and salted in a tub by a cruel man that wanted to eat them,
and of that strange insect called a Praying Mantis which alighted upon
St. Francis' sleeve and sang the _Nunc Dimittis_ before it flew away.

These were all stories that made bedtime sweet, stories to remember and
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