"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled
him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant
when she could not find her rolling-pin.

"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.

Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about
a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been
corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora
about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery
stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:"
Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity,
had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense
tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed
in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Cæsar
landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was
asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had
landed.

"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."

It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies
huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.

But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were
the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter
whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not
matter you were able to remember so much more easily. He could have
listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their
pods when the donkey was trotting with the boy Christ and His mother and