would
make a sign in the air with the match. He never omitted this ritual,
and Miss Dunham thinks it became like tapping the railings was to Dr.
Johnson.

"He used to come in and swing about on his little feet," she said.
And it is true that his feet like his voice seemed too small to
belong to the rest of him. Her great difficulty was that she could
not get him to read and select among the contributions: too often
this was left to her and she felt painfully inadequate to the task.

For the first year all the Notes of the Week were written by G.K.
Then he got Mr. Titterton as Assistant Editor: and after that, said
the Assistant Editor with simplicity, "You couldn't always tell good
Titterton from bad Chesterton." Everyone who worked at the office
adored G.K.: especially the "little" people, typists, secretaries,
office boys.

"He was so kind," Miss Dunham said. "He never got angry. He never
minded being interrupted. If his papers blew away he never got
impatient. His patience hurt one." She had never seen him angry.

That the paper was ever got out seems wonderful as the staff recall
those days. Yet I think that all the stories about Gilbert's
inefficiency as Editor have contributed towards an impression that I
shared myself until quite lately--that _G.K.'s Weekly_ was
immeasurably inferior to the _New Witness_. Going more carefully
through the files I have begun to question that impression.

The paper was produced under certain obvious disadvantages. Even
spending some days a week in London and telephoning freely it is not
easy to edit a paper from the country. Gilbert thought of himself as
a bad editor, and was not in fact a very good one. The contributions
he accepted were uneven in quality: both Leaders and Notes of the
Week when not written by him tended to be weak imitations of either
himself or Belloc--tinged at times with an air of omniscience
tolerable in Belloc but quite intolerable in his imitators. Just
occasionally the equally unedited Notes and Leader were in
contradiction of each other. Yet the paper remains an exceedingly
interesting one. Analysing my earlier and late impressions I
concluded that my earlier feeling of boredom sprang from the
inevitable effect of the _New Witness_ coming first and therefore
having been read first. It is a disadvantage of consistency that, as
Bernard Shaw remarked, you have said the same thing, you have told
the same story, so often as the years go by.

Taking a