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.