r place
She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face.
Her mild eyes gliding very slow
Across the letters to and fro,
While wagged the guttering candle flame
In the wind that through the window came.
And sometimes in the silence she
Would mumble a sentence audibly,
Or shake her head as if to say,
'You silly souls, to act this way!'
And never a sound from night I'd hear,
Unless some far-off cock crowed clear;
Or her old shuffling thumb should turn
Another page; and rapt and stern,
Through her great glasses bent on me
She'd glance into reality;
And shake her round old silvery head,
With--'You!--I thought you was in bed!'--
Only to tilt her book again,
And rooted in Romance remain.

NOD

Softly along the road of evening,
In a twilight dim with rose,
Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew
Old Nod, the shepherd, goes.

His drowsy flock streams on before him,
Their fleeces charged with gold,
To where the sun's last beam leans low
On Nod the shepherd's fold.

The hedge is quick and green with briar,
From their sand the conies creep;
And all the birds that fly in heaven
Flock singing home to sleep.

His lambs outnumber a noon's roses,
Yet, when night's shadows fall,
His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon,
Misses not one of all.

His are the quiet steeps of dreamland,
The waters of no-more-pain;
His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars,
"Rest, rest, and rest again."

_G. K. Chesterton_

This brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and lyricist,
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, Kensington, in
1874, and began his literary life by reviewing books on art for
various magazines. He is best known as a writer of flashing,
paradoxical essays on anything and everything, like _Tremendous
Trifles_ (1909), _Varied Types_ (1905), and _All Things Considered_
(1910). But he is also a stimulating critic; a keen appraiser, as in
his volume _Heretics_ (1905) and his analytical studies of Robert
Browning, Charles Dickens, and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of
strange and grotesque romances like _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_
(1906), _The Man Who Was Thursday_ (1908), which Chesterton himself
has subtitled "A Nightmare," and _The Flying Inn_ (1914); the author
of several books of fantastic sho