Michael Malone - Weebly

decided to give them. Probably only one of that graced
minority lived in all of Dingley Falls: Father Sloan
Highwick. At divinity school, a poetical classmate
whose procrastinating habit it was during study periods
to sketch portraits in verse wrote perceptively of the
future rector:
Our Sloan's a man of bonhomie.
So blithesome, so blessed in jollity, He thinks that
the Reaper's grim scythe is a grin Inviting souls over for
Heavenly gin.
That death should be to Highwick an invitation to a
grand cocktail party in the sky did not at all mean that
with any de contemptu mundi distaste for his earthly
lot he was eager to fling himself into the reception line
where his eternal Host waited to welcome him. Quite
the contrary. As he was always among the first to arrive
and the last to leave any Dingley Falls gathering to
which he was asked, so the good white-haired Father
was in no hurry to rush from this party to the next. For
Highwick was happy wherever he was. He was, for
example, happy living alone in the rectory of St.
Andrew's. That life would have been fuller had he taken