cal custom must have originated, in men
covering up their mistakes by saying they were fulfilling a ritual
which had fallen into neglect. You must say you did it on purpose, he
said, say it was a rite too long omitted and it will soon be kept up
every year and men will forget its origin, and it will be known as
the Bump of Beaconsfield. When a friend of his brought him a
two-bladed African spear, he said, as he threw it about the lawn,
that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in Beaconsfield
and how few weapons were ever thrown on any of them, although all men
enjoyed, or would enjoy spear throwing more, he believed, than they
enjoyed clock golf. He at any rate was a genuinely free man, who did
what it amused and pleased him to do, and did not think he had to
choose between the forms of activity or rest currently pursued by his
neighbours. Much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that
quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Columbus

_He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends, who
could not understand him, pointed out that America had already been
discovered, I think they said by Christopher Columbus, some time ago,
and that there were big cities of Anglo-Saxon People there already,
New York and Boston and so on. But the Admiral explained to them,
kindly enough, that this had nothing to do with it. They might have
discovered America, but he had not_.

From _A Fragment_, in _The Coloured Lands_.

IN THE CHAPTER of his _Autobiography_ entitled "The Incomplete
Traveller" Chesterton has said "after all, the strangest country I
ever visited was England." It was of the very essence of his
philosophy that each one of us has to make again the discoveries of
our ancestors if we are to be travellers and not trippers. "The
traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to
see." Thus Chesterton tried to discover each country that he visited
and he records that the nearer countries are sometimes harder to
discover than the more remote. For Poland is more akin to England
than is France: Ireland more mysterious than Italy.

France, Ireland and supremely Palestine brought their contribution to
that mental and spiritual development traced in earlier chapters. On
Ireland, Rome, Jerusalem and the United States he wrote books. It may
really be said that on the States he wrote two books, for in t