of Chalk' to 'A Dragon's
Grandmother.' Provided we believe in dragons, there is good reason to
suppose that they have grandmothers. It is not so easy to write a good
essay on the subject. Chesterton does so with great skill, and it makes
it quite certain to be so intellectual as to hate fairies is a piteous
condition.

What he brings out in this particular essay is that what modern
intellectualism has done is to make 'the hero extraordinary, the tale
ordinary,' whereas the fairy tale makes 'the hero ordinary, the tale
extraordinary.'

In this book of short essays it is only possible to take a few, but care
has been taken to attempt to show the enormous versatility of
Chesterton's mind. It has been said quite wrongly that Chesterton cannot
describe pathos. This is certainly untrue. He can so admirably describe
humour that he cannot help knowing the pathetic, which is often so akin
to humour. I am not sure that this ability to describe the melancholy is
not to be seen in one of these essays that narrates how he travelled in
a train in which there was a dead man whose end he never knew.

Perhaps there is nothing more interesting than turning out one's
pockets--all sorts of long forgotten mementoes cause a lump in the
throat or a gleam in the eye; but it is very annoying, on arriving at a
station where tickets are collected, to find everything that relates to
your past twenty years of life and be unable to find the ticket that
makes you a legitimate rider on the iron way. This is what Chesterton
describes in a delightful essay.

One day, so Chesterton tells us in the 'Riddle of the Ivy,' he happened
to be leaving Battersea, and being asked where he was going, calmly
replied to 'Battersea.' Which is really to say that we find our way to
Brixton more eagerly by way of Singapore than by way of Kennington. In a
few words, it is what we mean when we say, as every traveller says at
times, 'Home, sweet home.' I fancy this is what Mr. Chesterton means. It
is a beautiful thought--a fine love of the home, a strange understanding
of the wish of the traveller who once more wishes to see the old cottage
before he journeys 'across the Bar.'

The sight of chained convicts being taken to a prison causes Chesterton
to essay on the 'filthy torture' of our prisons, the whole system of
which is a 'relic of sin.' Perhaps he is right! But is it that the
prisons are wrong, or is it that society makes criminals? After all,
convicts are chain