your finger up the columns (he illustrated exactly the way
in which the finger was moved), and there you were. Mr. Gingham said
that it was a caution, and that logarithms (I quote his exact phrase)
must be a terror.

Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins,
the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry,
would come and take a look, at the figures. But they never could make
much of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one could
discuss.

Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fire
insurance and would say; as a business man, that surely that couldn't
be fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it:
and Mullins would say surely there couldn't be fifty dollars for taxes,
because there weren't any taxes, and the Dean would admit that of course
it couldn't be for the taxes. In fact, the truth is that the Dean's
figures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably with the
mathematical professor of two generations back.

It was always Mullins's intention some day to look into the finances of
the church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at the
little Anglican college with the cricket ground. But he was a busy man.
As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business nowadays
is getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his Sunday
mornings his own. Certainly Henry Mullins could not. They belonged
largely to Smith's Hotel, and during the fishing season they belonged
away down the lake, so far away that practically no one, unless it was
George Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them.

But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of the
new church.

That was the bitterness of it.

For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in the
little stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in his
sermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon. His one hope had been to set up
a greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a Brighter Beacon.

After twenty-five years of waiting, he had been able at last to kindle
it. Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church. First
of all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for the
newer Evidence. It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said,
to lay hands on it. Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone of
it and build it into a Sunday School, as a