al in matters of endeavour, and Mullins said that
it was. Then the rector asked if even one mugwump was, in the Christian
sense, deleterious. Mullins said that one mugwump would kill anything.
After that the Dean hardly spoke at all.

In fact, the rector presently said that he mustn't detain Mullins too
long and that he had detained him too long already and that Mullins must
be weary from his train journey and that in cases of extreme weariness
nothing but a sound sleep was of any avail; he himself, unfortunately,
would not be able to avail himself of the priceless boon of slumber
until he had first retired to his study to write some letters; so that
Mullins, who had a certain kind of social quickness of intuition, saw
that it was time to leave, and went away.

It was midnight as he went down the street, and a dark, still night.
That can be stated positively because it came out in court afterwards.
Mullins swore that it was a dark night; he admitted, under examination,
that there may have been the stars, or at least some of the less
important of them, though he had made no attempt, as brought out on
cross-examination, to count them: there may have been, too, the electric
lights, and Mullins was not willing to deny that it was quite possible
that there was more or less moonlight. But that there was no light that
night in the form of sunlight, Mullins was absolutely certain. All that,
I say, came out in court.

But meanwhile the rector had gone upstairs to his study and had seated
himself in front of his table to write his letters. It was here always
that he wrote his sermons. From the window of the room you looked
through the bare white maple trees to the sweeping outline of the church
shadowed against the night sky, and beyond that, though far off, was
the new cemetery where the rector walked of a Sunday (I think I told you
why): beyond that again, for the window faced the east, there lay, at no
very great distance, the New Jerusalem. There were no better things that
a man might look towards from his study window, nor anything that could
serve as a better aid to writing.

But this night the Dean's letters must have been difficult indeed to
write. For he sat beside the table holding his pen and with his head
bent upon his other hand, and though he sometimes put a line or two on
the paper, for the most part he sat motionless. The fact is that Dean
Drone was not trying to write letters, but only one letter. He was
writ