regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the
public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced
and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed
me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that
there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a
remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty
as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I
am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that
most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I
look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that
should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist.*

[* G. K. Chesterton. _Autobiography_, pp. 22-3.]

CHAPTER II

Childhood

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON was born on May 29, 1874 at a house in
Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, just below the great tower of the
Waterworks which so much impressed his childish imagination. Lower
down the hill was the Anglican Church of St. George, and here he was
baptised. When he was about five, the family moved to Warwick
Gardens. As old-fashioned London houses go, 11 Warwick Gardens is
small. On the ground floor, a back and front room were for the
Chestertons drawing-room and dining-room with a folding door between,
the only other sitting-room being a small study built out over the
garden. A long, narrow, green strip, which must have been a good deal
longer before a row of garages was built at the back, was Gilbert's
playground. His bedroom was a long room at the top of a not very high
house. For what is in most London houses the drawing-room floor is in
this house filled by two bedrooms and there is only one floor above it.

Cecil was five years younger than Gilbert, who welcomed his birth
with the remark, "Now I shall always have an audience," a prophecy
remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. As
soon as Cecil could speak, he began to argue and the brothers'
intercourse thenceforward consisted of unending discussion. They
always argued, they never quarrelled.

There was also a little sister Beatrice who died when Gilbert was
very young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a
rocking-horse more clearly than he remembered her death, and in his
memory linked with the fall the sense of loss and sorrow that came
with the death.

It would be impossible to