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