looking for mugwump. But it wasn't there. I have known him, in his
little study upstairs, turn over the pages of the "Animals of
Palestine," looking for a mugwump. But there was none there. It must
have been unknown in the greater days of Judea.


So things went on from month to month, and from year to year, and the
debt and the charges loomed like a dark and gathering cloud on the
horizon. I don't mean to say that efforts were not made to face the
difficulty and to fight it. They were. Time after time the workers of
the congregation got together and thought out plans for the
extinction of the debt. But somehow, after every trial, the debt grew
larger with each year, and every system that could be devised turned
out more hopeless than the last.

They began, I think, with the "endless chain" of letters of appeal.
You may remember the device, for it was all-popular in clerical
circles some ten or fifteen years ago. You got a number of people to
write each of them three letters asking for ten cents from three each
of their friends and asking each of them to send on three similar
letters. Three each from three each, and three each more from each!
Do you observe the wonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has
forgotten how the Willing Workers of the Church of England Church of
Mariposa sat down in the vestry room in the basement with a pile of
stationery three feet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know,
will never forget it. Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the
Exchange Bank, for it was here that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the
judge's daughter, for the first time; and they worked so busily that
they wrote out ever so many letters--eight or nine--in a single
afternoon, and they discovered that their handwritings were awfully