ion called Death may be something as beautiful and
dazzling as the transformation called Love. It may make the dead man
'happy,' just as your mother knows that you are happy. But none the
less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind.
A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the
inscrutable Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as
she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty,
shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily
to me? I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a
thief. I know you are not going to part: neither physically,
mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she sees a new element in your
life, wholly from outside--is it not natural, given her temperament,
that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let
us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not
they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in
the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is
their final home and rest. Your mother would certainly have worried
if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is
bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are
engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted,
opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place.
I could have prophesied her unrest: wait and she will calm down all
right, dear. God comfort her: I dare not. . . ."

". . . Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born of comfortable but honest
parents on the top of Campden Hill, Kensington. He was christened at
St. George's Church which stands just under that more imposing
building, the Waterworks Tower. This place was chosen, apparently, in
order that the whole available water supply might be used in the
intrepid attempt to make him a member of Christ, a child of God and
an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.

"Of the early years of this remarkable man few traces remain. One of
his earliest recorded observations was the simple exclamation, full
of heart-felt delight, 'Look at Baby. Funny Baby.' Here we see the
first hint of that ineffable conversational modesty, that shy social
self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light under a bushel. His
mother also recounts with apparent amusement an incident connected
with his imperious demand for his father's top-hat. 'Give me that
hat, please.' 'No, dear,