Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Fra

ws the truth of his own theory, that to love each thing separately strengthens the power of loving, to have tried to love everyone is, as he tells Frances, no bad preparation for loving her. The emotion of falling in

state I have to offer you. As far as I can make out my equipment for

shows traces of pure Norman work. The vandalism of Cromwe

d to break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that

e forgotten. It has his name in it still with an affectionate inscription f

aining everything good and generous and loyal and

element however is a thing 'to take stones out of a horse's hoof.' What a beautiful sensation of security it gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money e

y now and then I strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some

s of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such is the

ed for Mr. Nutt.* I have been working at it fairly steadily, which I think jolly creditable under the ci

beards

the only new and neat-looking thing in the Museum. We'll soon mellow it-

and omnivorous but now happy

, coffee, claret, sea-water and oxygen to its own perfect satisfaction.

tory can be made at present. After all, my tastes are stoically simple. A straw hat, a

ny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary se

, 'We haven't got any-not got any here.' I asked 'Where?' 'Oh, they're out you know. All round,' he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea and the sky. 'All out round. We've left them all round at places.' To this day I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked when they would quit these weird retreats. He said in an hour: in an hour I called again. Were they in now? 'Well not in-not in, just yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he wasn't quite well. 'Are they still-all out at places?' I asked with restrained humour. 'Oh no!' he said with a burst of reassuring pride. 'They are only out there-out behind, you know.' I hope my face expressed my beaming comprehension of the spot alluded to. Eventually, at a

aniac for balls. He brought me a selection of large red globes nearly as big as Dutch cheeses. I said, 'Are these tennis-balls?' He said, 'Oh did you want tennis-balls?' I said Yes-they often came in handy at tennis. The gobl

s on the subject of the fee for playing there. He seemed to have been wound up to make only one remark, 'It's sixpence.' Under these circumstances the attempt to discover whether the sixpence covered a day's tennis or a week or fifty years

nce of something nameless. There is a claw-curl in the sea-bent trees,

se with the necessities.' That I think would be a splendid motto to write (in letters of brown gold) over the porch of our hypothetical home. There will be a sofa for you, for example, but no chairs, for I prefer the floor. There will be a select store of chocolate-creams (t

scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody wishes out of the way. No: my idea (which is much cheaper) is to make a house really allegoric: really explain its own essential meaning. Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object, the more prosaic the object the better; and the more coarsely and rudely the inscription was traced the better. 'Hast thou sent the Rain upon the Earth?' should be inscribed

ay school of little Devils is pleasing. They will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague respect; they will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever lived since their prince tempted Eve, with a halo of hair and great heavenly

I happen to know one factor in the case, and one only, of which you are wholly ignorant. I know you . . . I know one thing which ha

ho can look to it as well as she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty, shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me? I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a thief. I know you are not going to part: neither physically, mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she sees a new element in your life, wholly from outside-is it not natural, given her temperament, that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not they who a

's Church which stands just under that more imposing building, the Waterworks Tower. This place was chosen, apparently, in order that the whole av

conversational modesty, that shy social self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light under a bushel. His mother also recounts with apparent amusement an incident connected with his imperious demand for his father's top-hat. 'Gi

tures on. He was far too innately conscientious not to use these materials to draw on. To other uses, asserted by some to belong to these objects, he paid little heed. The only really curious thing about his school life was that he had a weird and quite involun

le. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete m

ed and relaxed his hold. They gazed at each other. Then the foe quoted the following line. In this land of savages they knew each other. For the next two hours they talked books. They have talked books ever since. The boy was Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The incident just narrated is the true and real account of the first and deepest of our hero's male connections. But another was to ensue, probably equally profound and far more pregnant with awful and dazzling consequences. Bentley always had a habit of trying to do things w

the views of an ethical mother and a soul of his own which for sheer simplicity is something staggering. Vernède with an Oriental and inscrutable placidity varied every now and then with dazzling agility and Meredithian humour. Waldo d'Avigdor who masks with complete fashionable triviality a Hebraic immutability of passion tried in a more ironical and bitter service than his Father Jacob. Lawrence and Maurice Solomon, who show another side of the same people, the love of home, the love of children, the meek and malicious humour, the tranquil service of a law. Salter who shows how beautiful and ridiculous a combination can be m

ards: he was not exactly that: so they naturally found each other interesting. He went through some rather appalling

t it was the name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend. He came to a small front-garden; if it was a public-house it was not a businesslike one. They raised the latch-they ran

he understood, was Mrs. Blogg. There was a long, blonde, smiling young person who seemed to think him quite off his head and who was addressed as Ethel. There were two people whose meaning and status he couldn't imagi

at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny

ing. He is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful

has not, with all his faults, 'gone after strange women.' You cannot think how a man's self-restraint is rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love