its present worth, less a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty
complicated sum. Then if you try to add to this the annual cost of
insurance, and deduct from it three-quarters of a stipend, year by
year, and then suddenly remember that three-quarters is too much,
because you have forgotten the boarding-school fees of the littlest
of the Drones (including French, as an extra--she must have it, all
the older girls did), you have got a sum that pretty well defies
ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of it was that the Dean knew
perfectly well that with the help of logarithms he could have done
the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican college they had stopped
short at that very place in the book. They had simply explained that
Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the time, seemed
amply sufficient.

So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and
adding them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very
often Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the
rector and ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that
with a book of logarithms you could work it out in a moment. You
would simply open the book and run your finger up the columns (he
illustrated exactly the way in which the finger was moved), and there
you were. Mr. Gingham said that it was a caution, and that logarithms
(I quote his exact phrase) must be a terror.

Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins,
the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry,
would come and take a look, at the figures. But they never could make
much of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one
could discuss.