ing a letter of resignation. If you have not done that for forty
years it is extremely difficult to get the words.

So at least the Dean found it. First he wrote one set of words and then
he sat and thought and wrote something else. But nothing seemed to suit.

The real truth was that Dean Drone, perhaps more than he knew himself,
had a fine taste for words and effects, and when you feel that a
situation is entirely out of the common, you naturally try, if you have
that instinct, to give it the right sort of expression.

I believe that at the time when Rupert Drone had taken the medal
in Greek over fifty years ago, it was only a twist of fate that had
prevented him from becoming a great writer. There was a buried author in
him just as there was a buried financier in Jefferson Thorpe. In fact,
there were many people in Mariposa like that, and for all I know you may
yourself have seen such elsewhere. For instance, I am certain that Billy
Rawson, the telegraph operator at Mariposa, could easily have invented
radium. In the same way one has only to read the advertisements of Mr.
Gingham, the undertaker, to know that there is still in him a poet,
who could have written on death far more attractive verses than the
Thanatopsis of Cullen Bryant, and under a title less likely to offend
the public and drive away custom. He has told me this himself.

So the Dean tried first this and then that and nothing would seem to
suit. First of all he wrote:

"It is now forty years since I came among you, a youth full of life and
hope and ardent in the work before me--" Then he paused, doubtful of the
accuracy and clearness of the expression, read it over again and again
in deep thought and then began again:

"It is now forty years since I came among you, a broken and melancholy
boy, without life or hope, desiring only to devote to the service of
this parish such few years as might remain of an existence blighted
before it had truly begun--" And then again the Dean stopped. He read
what he had written; he frowned; he crossed it through with his pen.
This was no way to write, this thin egotistical strain of complaint.
Once more he started:

"It is now forty years since I came among you, a man already tempered
and trained, except possibly in mathematics--" And then again the rector
paused and his mind drifted away to the memory of the Anglican professor
that I spoke of, who had had so little sense of his higher mission as to
omit the tea