refer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company,--and was standing
beside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in the faith who was
journeying westward also--I may say he was a commercial traveller,--and
beside us was a dear sister in the spirit seated in a deck chair, while
near us were two other dear souls in grace engaged in Christian pastime
on the deck,--I allude more particularly to the game of deck billiards."

I leave it to any reasonable man whether, with that complete and
fair-minded explanation of the environment, it was not perfectly proper
to close down the analogy, as the rector did, with the simple words: "In
fact, it was an extremely fine morning."

Yet there were some people, even in Mariposa, that took exception
and spent their Sunday dinner time in making out that they couldn't
understand what Dean Drone was talking about, and asking one another
if they knew. Once, as he passed out from the doors of the Greater
Testimony, the rector heard some one say: "The Church would be all right
if that old mugwump was out of the pulpit." It went to his heart like a
barbed thorn, and stayed there.

You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle,
and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because
perhaps you didn't hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all.
Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at the
time. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the rectory,
and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M, looking for
mugwump. But it wasn't there. I have known him, in his little study
upstairs, turn over the pages of the "Animals of Palestine," looking for
a mugwump. But there was none there. It must have been unknown in the
greater days of Judea.

So things went on from month to month, and from year to year, and the
debt and the charges loomed like a dark and gathering cloud on the
horizon. I don't mean to say that efforts were not made to face the
difficulty and to fight it. They were. Time after time the workers of
the congregation got together and thought out plans for the extinction
of the debt. But somehow, after every trial, the debt grew larger
with each year, and every system that could be devised turned out more
hopeless than the last.

They began, I think, with the "endless chain" of letters of appeal. You
may remember the device, for it was all-popular in clerical circles some
ten or fifte