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 teaching of logarithms. And the
rector mused so long that when he began again it seemed to him that
it was simpler and better to discard the personal note altogether,
and he wrote:

"There are times, gentlemen, in the life of a parish, when it comes
to an epoch which brings it to a moment when it reaches a point--"

The Dean stuck fast again, but refusing this time to be beaten went
resolutely on:

"--reaches a point where the circumstances of the moment make the
epoch such as to focus the life of the parish in that time."

Then the Dean saw that he was beaten, and he knew that he not only
couldn't manage the parish but couldn't say so in proper English, and
of the two the last was the bitterer discovery.

He raised his head, and looked for a moment through the window at the
shadow of the church against the night, so outlined that you could
almost fancy that the light of the New Jerusalem was beyond it. Then
he wrote, and this time not to the world at large but only to
Mullins: