第28章

"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.