FOUR
The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone
The Church of England in Mariposa is on a side street, where the
maple trees are thickest, a little up the hill from the heart of the
town. The trees above the church and the grass plot that was once the
cemetery, till they made the new one (the Necropolis, over the brow
of the hill), fill out the whole corner. Down behind the church, with
only the driving shed and a lane between, is the rectory. It is a
little brick house with odd angles. There is a hedge and a little
gate, and a weeping ash tree with red berries.
At the side of the rectory, churchward, is a little grass lawn with
low hedges and at the side of that two wild plum trees, that are
practically always in white blossom. Underneath them is a rustic
table and chairs, and it is here that you may see Rural Dean Drone,
the incumbent of the Church of England Church, sitting, in the
chequered light of the plum tress that is neither sun nor shadow.
Generally you will find him reading, and when I tell you that at the
end of the grass plot where the hedge is highest there is a yellow
bee hive with seven bees that belong to Dean Drone, you will realize
that it is only fitting that the Dean is reading in the Greek. For
what better could a man be reading beneath the blossom of the plum
trees, within the very sound of the bees, than the Pastorals of
Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might put a man to
sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as
Theocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he reads
without fear of dropping into slumber.
Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave their
college. Not so Dean Drone. I have often heard him say that if he
couldn't take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half
hour, he would feel lost. It's a certain activity of the brain that
must be stilled somehow. The Dean, too, seemed to have a native
feeling for the Greek language. I have often heard people who might
sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he
always refused. One couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much
in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser
not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was
something gone, something missing immediately. I believe that many
classical scholars feel this way, and like to read the Greek just as
it is, without the hazard of trying to put it into so poor a medium
as English. So that when Dean Drone said that he simply couldn't
translate it, I believe he was perfectly sincere.
Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud. That was another matter.
Whenever, for example, Dr. Gallagher--I mean, of course, old Dr.
Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country in
the afternoon)--would come over and bring his latest Indian relics
to show to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two.
As soon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean would
reach for his Theocritus. I remember that on the day when Dr.
Gallagher brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the
railway embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read
to him so long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe,
dozed off in his chair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with
the book across his knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should
wake up again. And the skull was on the table between them, and from
above the plum blossoms fluttered down, till they made flakes on it
as white as Dr. Gallagher's hair.
I don't want you to suppose that the Rev. Mr. Drone spent the
whole of his time under the trees. Not at all. In point of fact, the
rector's life was one round of activity which lie himself might
deplore but was powerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath
the trees of an afternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the
Infant Class at three, and after that, with scarcely an hour between,
the Mothers' Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club,
and that evening the Bible Study Class, and the next morning the
Early Workers' Guild at eleven-thirty. The whole week was like that,
and if one found time to sit down for an hour or so to recuperate it
was the most one could do. After all, if a busy man spends the little
bit of leisure that he gets in advanced classical study, there is
surely no harm in it. I suppose, take it all in all, there wasn't a
busier man than the Rural Dean among the Anglican clergy of the
diocese.
If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he
spent it in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not,
instead of taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon
amusing the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and
toys and clockwork steamboats for them.
It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest and
aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this
kind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition. But the Rev.
Mr. Drone had a curious liking for machinery. I think I never heard
him preach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now
see you on high Jeremiah Two).
So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese
wings for Teddy Moore, the photographer's son, and closed down the
infant class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not
miss the pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown. It is
foolish to trust a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.
In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie
Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to
allow the afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things
that Mr. Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he
was making the sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you
know) the Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child
with just the same pleasure. Death, you know, to the clergy is a
different thing from what it is to us. The Dean and Mr. Gingham used
often to speak of it as they walked through the long grass of the new
cemetery, the Necropolis. And when your Sunday walk is to your wife's
grave, as the Dean's was, perhaps it seems different to anybody.
The Church of England Church, I said; stood close to the rectory, a
tall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar
beams that ran to the point of the roof. There used to stand on the
same spot the little stone church that all the grown-up people in
Mariposa still remember, a quaint little building in red and grey
stone. About it was the old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out
later into the grass plot round the new church, and the headstones
laid out flat, and no new graves have been put there for ever so
long. But the Mariposa children still walk round and read the
headstones lying flat in the grass and look for the old ones,--
because some of them are ever so old--forty or fifty years back.
Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man with
serious perplexities. You could easily convince yourself of the
contrary. For if you watched the Rev. Mr. Drone as he sat reading in
the Greek, you would notice that no very long period every passed
without his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the
leaves of the Theocritus and that were covered close with figures.
And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would add
them up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then
down it to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again
to see what it was that must have been left out.
Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean's forte. They
never were the forte of the men who had been trained at the little
Anglican college with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground,
where Rupert Drone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years
ago. You will see the medal at any time lying there in its open box
on the rectory table, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone
girls, Lilian, or Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as
I say, mathematics were not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it
(in a Christian spirit, you will understand) the memory of his
mathematical professor, and often he spoke with great bitterness. I
have often heard him say that in his opinion the colleges ought to
dismiss, of course in a Christian spirit, all the professors who are
not, in the most reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.
No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less
just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Dean
always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For you
see, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family
in the lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the
need of reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it
shows plainly enough that the colleges are not truly filling their
divine mission.
But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model
aeroplane. These were far more serious. Night and day they had been
with the rector now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if
anything, more intricate.
If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large
church with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the
special glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on
the roof for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass
windows for the exaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to
reckon up the debt on such a church and figure out its interest and
its present worth, less a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty
complicated sum. Then if you try to add to this the annual cost of
insurance, and deduct from it three-quarters of a stipend, year by
year, and then suddenly remember that three-quarters is too much,
because you have forgotten the boarding-school fees of the littlest
of the Drones (including French, as an extra--she must have it, all
the older girls did), you have got a sum that pretty well defies
ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of it was that the Dean knew
perfectly well that with the help of logarithms he could have done
the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican college they had stopped
short at that very place in the book. They had simply explained that
Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the time, seemed
amply sufficient.
So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and
adding them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very
often Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the
rector and ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that
with a book of logarithms you could work it out in a moment. You
would simply open the book and run 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 lesser testimony. Then, when that provided impracticable, it was
suggested that the stone be reverently fashioned into a wall that
should stand as a token. And when even that could not be managed, the
stone of the little church was laid reverently into a stone pile;
afterwards it was devoutly sold to a building contractor, and, like
so much else in life, was forgotten.
But the building of the church, no one, I think, will forget. The
Dean threw himself into the work. With his coat off and his white
shirt-sleeves conspicuous among the gang that were working at the
foundations, he set his hand to the shovel, himself guided the
road-scraper, urging on the horses; cheering and encouraging the men,
till they begged him to desist. He mingled with the stone-masons,
advising, helping, and giving counsel, till they pleaded with him to
rest. He was among the carpenters, sawing, hammering, enquiring,
suggesting, till they besought him to lay off. And he was night and
day with the architect's assistants, drawing, planning, revising,
till the architect told him to cut it out.
So great was his activity, that I doubt whether the new church would
ever have been finished, had not the wardens and the vestry men
insisted that Mr. Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the
Mackinaw trip up the lakes,--the only foreign travel of the Dean's
life.
So in due time the New Church was built and it towered above the
maple trees of Mariposa like a beacon on a hill. It stood so high
that from the open steeple of it, where the bells were, you could see
all the town lying at its feet, and the farmsteads to the south of
it, and the railway like a double pencil line, and Lake Wissanotti
spread out like a map. You could see and appreciate things from the
height of the new church,--such as the size and the growing wealth of
Mariposa,--that you never could have seen from the little stone
church at all.
Presently the church was opened and the Dean preached his first
sermon in it, and he called it a Greater Testimony, and he said that
it was an earnest, or first fruit of endeavour, and that it was a
token or pledge, and he named it also a covenant. He said, too, that
it was an anchorage and a harbour and a lighthouse as well as being a
city set upon a hill; and he ended by declaring it an Ark of Refuge
and notified them that the Bible Class would meet in the basement of
it on that and every other third Wednesday.
In the opening months of preaching about it the Dean had called the
church so often an earnest and a pledge and a guerdon and a
tabernacle, that I think he used to forget that it wasn't paid for.
It was only when the agent of the building society and a
representative of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ Co. (Limited),
used to call for quarterly payments that he was suddenly reminded of
the fact. Always after these men came round the Dean used to preach a
special sermon on sin, in the course of which he would mention that
the ancient Hebrews used to put unjust traders to death,--a thing of
which he spoke with Christian serenity.
I don't think that at first anybody troubled much about the debt on
the church. Dean Drone's figures showed that it was only a matter of
time before it would be extinguished; only a little effort was
needed, a little girding up of the loins of the congregation and they
could shoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet. Let
them but set their hands to the plough and they could soon guide it
into the deep water. Then they might furl their sails and sit every
man under his own olive tree.
Meantime, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins,
the interest on the debt was paid somehow, or, when it wasn't paid,
was added to the principal.
I don't know whether you have had any experience with Greater
Testimonies and with Beacons set on Hills. If you have, you will
realize how, at first gradually, and then rapidly, their position
from year to year grows more distressing. What with the building loan
and the organ instalment, and the fire insurance,--a cruel charge,--
and the heat and light, the rector began to realize as he added up
the figures that nothing but logarithms could solve them. Then the
time came when not only the rector, but all the wardens knew and the
sidesmen knew that the debt was more than the church could carry;
then the choir knew and the congregation knew and at last everybody
knew; and there were special collections at Easter and special days of
giving, and special weeks of tribulation, and special arrangements
with the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ Co. And it was noticed that
when the Rural Dean announced a service of Lenten Sorrow,--aimed more
especially at the business men,--the congregation had diminished by
forty per cent.
I suppose things are just the same elsewhere,--I mean the peculiar
kind of discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation
in Mariposa after the setting up of the Beacon. There were those who
claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had
kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There
were those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips
were sealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there
were others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the
church.
Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the
city and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I
believe, to state it more fairly, he had "dropped in,"--the only
recognized means of access to such a service. He claimed that the
music that he had heard there was music, and that (outside of his
profession) the chanting and intoning could not be touched.
Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a
sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon
like that he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile,
failing the guarantee, he stayed away.
The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began to
cast doubts on eternal punishment,--doubts so grave as to keep them
absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney
took up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with
Joe Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.
All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his
special services, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the
Ark of Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with
every month the debt of the church lay heavy on his mind. At times he
forgot it. At other times he woke up in the night and thought about
it. Sometimes as he went down the street from the lighted precincts
of the Greater Testimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying
around a naphtha lamp under the open sky, it smote him to the heart
with a stab.
But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the
sermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speak
from personal knowledge when I say that the rector's sermons were not
only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material
in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety
of things that should have proved of the highest advantage to the
congregation.
There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed the
greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out
of it that he made from the pulpit. He was never willing to accept
even the faintest shade of rendering different from that commonly
given without being assured of the full concurrence of the
congregation. Either the translation must be unanimous and without
contradiction, or he could not pass it. He would pause in his sermon
and would say: "The original Greek is 'Hoson,' but perhaps you will
allow me to translate it as equivalent to 'Hoyon.'" And they did. So
that if there was any fault to be found it was purely on the side of
the congregation for not entering a protest at the time.
It was the same way in regard to machinery. After all, what better
illustrates the supreme purpose of the All Wise than such a thing as
the dynamo or the reciprocating marine engine or the pictures in the
Scientific American?
Then, too, if a man has had the opportunity to travel and has seen
the great lakes spread out by the hand of Providence from where one
leaves the new dock at the Sound to where one arrives safe and
thankful with one's dear fellow-passengers in the spirit at the
concrete landing stage at Mackinaw--is not this fit and proper
material for the construction of an analogy or illustration? Indeed,
even apart from an analogy, is it not mighty interesting to narrate,
anyway? In any case, why should the. church-wardens have sent the
rector on the Mackinaw trip, if they had not expected him to make
some little return for it?
I lay some stress on this point because the criticisms directed
against the Mackinaw sermons always seemed so unfair. If the rector
had described his experiences in the crude language of the ordinary
newspaper, there might, I admit, have been something unfitting about
it. But he was always careful to express himself in a way that
showed,--or, listen, let me explain with an example.
"It happened to be my lot some years ago," he would say, "to find
myself a voyager, just as one is a voyager on the sea of life, on the
broad expanse of water which has been spread out to the north-west of
us by the hand of Providence, at a height of five hundred and
eighty-one feet above the level of the sea,--I refer, I may say, to
Lake Huron." Now, how different that is from saying: "I'll never
forget the time I went on the Mackinaw trip." The whole thing has a
different sound entirely. In the same way the Dean would go on:
"I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the
water,--I 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 fifteen years ago. You got a number of people to
write each of them three letters asking for ten cents from three each
of their friends and asking each of them to send on three similar
letters. Three each from three each, and three each more from each!
Do you observe the wonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has
forgotten how the Willing Workers of the Church of England Church of
Mariposa sat down in the vestry room in the basement with a pile of
stationery three feet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know,
will never forget it. Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the
Exchange Bank, for it was here that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the
judge's daughter, for the first time; and they worked so busily that
they wrote out ever so many letters--eight or nine--in a single
afternoon, and they discovered that their handwritings were awfully
alike, which was one of the most extraordinary and amazing
coincidences, you will admit, in the history of chirography.
But the scheme failed--failed utterly. I don't know why. The letters
went out and were copied broadcast and recopied, till you could see
the Mariposa endless chain winding its way towards the Rocky
Mountains. But they never got the ten cents. The Willing Workers
wrote for it in thousands, but by some odd chance they never struck
the person who had it.
Then after that there came a regular winter of effort. First of all
they had a bazaar that was got up by the Girls' Auxiliary and held in
the basement of the church. All the girls wore special costumes that
were brought up from the city, and they had booths, where there was
every imaginable thing for sale--pincushion covers, and chair covers,
and sofa covers, everything that you can think of. If the people had
once started buying them, the debt would have been lifted in no time.
Even as it was the bazaar only lost twenty dollars.
After that, I think, was the magic lantern lecture that Dean Drone
gave on "Italy and her Invaders." They got the lantern and the slides
up from the city, and it was simply splendid. Some of the slides were
perhaps a little confusing, but it was all there,--the pictures of
the dense Italian jungle and the crocodiles and the naked invaders
with their invading clubs. It was a pity that it was such a bad
night, snowing hard, and a curling match on, or they would have made
a lot of money out of the lecture. As it was the loss, apart from the
breaking of the lantern, which was unavoidable, was quite trifling.
I can hardly remember all the things that there were after that. I
recollect that it was always Mullins who arranged about renting the
hall and printing the tickets and all that sort of thing. His father,
you remember, had been at the Anglican college with Dean Drone, and
though the rector was thirty-seven years older than Mullins, he
leaned upon him, in matters of business, as upon a staff; and though
Mullins was thirty-seven years younger than the Dean, he leaned
against him, in matters of doctrine, as against a rock.
At one time they got the idea that what the public wanted was not
anything instructive but something light and amusing. Mullins said
that people loved to laugh. He said that if you get a lot of people
all together and get them laughing you can do anything you like with
them. Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery,
the English Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening
of readings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They
came mighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the
people had once started laughing it would have been all over with
them. As it was I heard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to
scream with laughter: they said they just felt like bursting into
peals of laughter all the time. Even when, in the more subtle parts,
they didn't feel like bursting out laughing, they said they had all
they could do to keep from smiling. They said they never had such a
hard struggle in their lives not to smile.
In fact the chairman said when he put the vote of thanks that he was
sure if people had known what the lecture was to be like there would
have been a much better "turn-out." But you see all that the people
had to go on was just the announcement of the name of the lecturer,
Mr. Dreery, and that he would lecture on English Humour All Seats
Twenty-five Cents. As the chairman expressed it himself, if the
people had had any idea, any idea at all, of what the lecture would
be like they would have been there in hundreds. But how could they
get an idea that it would be so amusing with practically nothing to
go upon?
After that attempt things seemed to go from bad to worse. Nearly
everybody was disheartened about it. What would have happened to the
debt, or whether they would have ever paid it off, is more than I can
say, if it hadn't occurred that light broke in on Mullins in the
strangest and most surprising way you can imagine. It happened that
he went away for his bank holidays, and while he was away he happened
to be present in one of the big cities and saw how they went at it
there to raise money. He came home in such a state of excitement that
he went straight up from the Mariposa station to the rectory, valise
and all, and he burst in one April evening to where the Rural Dean
was sitting with the three girls beside the lamp in the front room,
and he cried out:
"Mr. Drone, I've got it,--I've got a way that will clear the debt
before you're a fortnight older. We'll have a Whirlwind Campaign in
Mariposa!"
But stay! The change from the depth of depression to the pinnacle of
hope is too abrupt. I must pause and tell you in another chapter of
the Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa.
