joke," says the King in apology.
"No," says Wayne; "we are two lobes of the same
brain . . . you, the humorist . . . I, the
fanatic. . . . You have a halberd and I have a sword,
let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are
its two essentials."

So ends the story.

Consider the preposterous elements of the book. A London with blue
horse-'buses. Bloodthirsty battles chiefly fought with halberds. A King
who acts as a war correspondent and parodies G. W. Stevens. It is
preposterous because it is romantic and we are not used to romance. But
to Chaucer let us say it would have appeared preposterous because he
could not have realized the initial premises. Before such a book the
average reader is helpless. His scale of values is knocked out of
working order by the very first page, almost by the very first sentence.
("The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been
playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it
till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.") The
absence of a love affair will deprive him of the only "human interest"
he can be really sure of. The Chestertonian idiom, above all, will soon
lead him to expect nothing, because he can never get any idea of what he
is to receive, and will bring him to a proper submissiveness. The later
stages are simple. The reader will wonder why it never before occurred
to him that area-railings are very like spears, and that a distant
tramcar may at night distinctly resemble a dragon. He may travel far,
once his imagination has been started on these lines. When romantic
possibilities have once shed a glow on the offices of the Gas Light and
Coke Company and on the erections of the Metropolitan Water Board, the
rest of life may well seem filled with wonder and wild desires.

Chesterton may be held to have invented a new species of detective
story--the sort that has no crime, no criminal, and a detective whose
processes are transcendental. _The Club of Queer Trades_ is the first
batch of such stories. _The Man who was Thursday_ is another specimen of
some length. More recently, Chesterton has repeated the type in some of
the _Father Brown_ stories. In _The Club of Queer Trades_, the
transcendental detective is Basil Grant, to describe whom with accuracy
is difficult, because of his author's inconsistencies. Basil Grant, for
instance, is "a man who scarcely stirred