a while.'"
To Johnnie--"Did he take the lecture business seriously?"
"No. He just wanted five minutes on the porch when he would talk to
no one but the kids."
Mr. O'Grady: "He said once, 'What I like about notes is that when
once you begin you can completely disregard them.' He stood for the
first lecture but mostly he sat. He enjoyed a joke so much, and they
enjoyed his enjoyment."
Mr. Engels: "For the first lecture he stood--part of him stood
behind a little rostrum, after that he sat at a big table."
Father Leo R. Ward was at Oxford when he debated "That the Law is a
Hass" and was amazed at the way the undergraduates adored him. "His
opponent begged them not to vote for G.K. at this critical moment in
the world's history. They cheered G.K. but voted against him to make
the other fellow feel good."
Sister Madeleva: "What did he do for recreation?"
Johnnie: "He did a lot of--sketching I guess you'd call it--and
he'd read the papers."
Sister Madeleva: "Did he like the campus?"
Johnnie: "Very much."
"Did he ever go down to the Grotto?"
Johnnie: "He seen it but he never got out of the car."
"Was it hard for him to walk?"
Johnnie: "No, he could walk kinda fast, but it was so hard for him
to get in or out of the car."
"Where did he go to church?"
Johnnie: "He came here to Notre Dame. He was close to 400 lbs. but
he'd never give it away. He'd break an ordinary scale, I guess. I
brought him under the main building, he got stuck in the door of the
car. Father O'Donnell tried to help. Mr. Chesterton said it reminded
him of an old Irishwoman: 'Why don't you get out sideways?' 'I have
no sideways.'"
To the debate with Darrow, Frances Taylor Patterson had gone a little
uneasy lest Chesterton's arguments "might seem somewhat literary in
comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the
famous trial lawyer." She found however that both trained mind and
rapier tongue were the property of G.K.C.
I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when
that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle headed.
As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing
all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and simply kept sparring
with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with
the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be
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