lly heard young Pendragon, escorted by
an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the river bank; and might (had
he been moved by romantic curiosities) have received the combined thanks
of the man from the ship and the girl from the canoe. But his fatigue
had fallen on him once more, and he only started once, when Flambeau
abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.

"That's no cigar-ash," he said rather wearily. "That's from the fire,
but you don't think so because you're all smoking cigars. That's just
the way I got my first faint suspicion about the chart."

"Do you mean Pendragon's chart of his Pacific Islands?" asked Fanshaw.

"You thought it was a chart of the Pacific Islands," answered Brown.
"Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think
it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial
flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same
feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and
most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among
tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It
was the map of this river."

"But how do you know?" asked Fanshaw.

"I saw the rock you thought was like a dragon, and the one like Merlin,
and--"

"You seem to have noticed a lot as we came in," cried Fanshaw. "We
thought you were rather abstracted."

"I was sea-sick," said Father Brown simply. "I felt simply horrible.
But feeling horrible has nothing to do with not seeing things." And he
closed his eyes.

"Do you think most men would have seen that?" asked Flambeau. He
received no answer: Father Brown was asleep.

NINE -- The God of the Gongs

IT was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when
the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver.
If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms,
it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the
monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals
by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that
looked more ugly than a lamp-post. A light fall of snow had half-melted
into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than silver, when it had
been fixed again by the seal of frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a
ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin of the coast, so as to
parallel the pale ribbon of the fo