int and to roar with laughter when Douglas Woodruff introduced him
to a meeting as "Mr. Chesterton who has just been looking round in
America. . . ."

He came into the office once on Press Day and saw the disordered
pile of papers and proofs on my desk. The place was certainly in an
awful mess. I wanted to show him a particular letter and shoved my
hand into the middle of one pile and was lucky enough to put my hand
right on the right document. G.K.C. complimented me on a filing
system that demanded a keen memory and then remarked enviously "I
wish they'd let me have a desk like that at home."

When Thomas Derrick drew his famous cartoon of G.K.C. milking a cow
he hesitated to give it to me for fear that G.K.C. would be offended.
I wanted to print it in a special number and telephoned to
Beaconsfield.

"Mr. Chesterton, I have here a cartoon of Derrick and would like to
put it in the special number. But as you are the subject of the
cartoon Derrick is afraid you may not like it."

"I would rather it were not printed," he replied. "I never liked
the idea of my name being used in the title of the paper and don't
want well-intentioned but embarrassing personalities. Of course, if
it were highly satirical, insulting and otherwise unflattering I'd
gladly have it on the front-page."

I assured him that it was anything but flattering and on the
front-page it went. It was used as the frontispiece of G.K.'s
Miscellany.

Many of the obituary writers said that he hated the cinema. In fact
he told me once that he had long wished to write a new translation of
Cyrano and would like to try his hand at a film scenario of the play.
His fingers had itched in the first place to retranslate the duel
scene in order to restore the strength of the ballade in English.
When he saw the film version of a Father Brown story I asked him what
he thought of it. He had liked the film as a film and the acting. He
added as an afterthought, "It gave me an idea for a new Father Brown
story."

A short-hand note was taken of the famous debate with Bernard Shaw.
It was decided to devote four pages of _G.K.'s Weekly_ to a report
which I tried to compile by avoiding the third person and
concentrating on significant quotations. But whereas Shaw put his
points in a few words from which elaboration could be cut, G.K.C.'s
argument was so clo