the speculative builder."
That "lava" itself he found interesting, but beneath or beside it a
little town like Beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of
English history. Something of the "seven sunken Englands" could be
found in the Old Town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the
"New Town." Burke had lived in Beaconsfield and was buried there; and
Gilbert once suggested to Mr. Garvin that they should appear at a
local festival, respectively as Fox ("a part for which I have no
claim except in circumference") and Burke ("I admire Burke in many
things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr.
Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke").

At the barber's he was often seen sitting at the end of a line
patiently awaiting his turn, for he could never shave himself and it
was only years later that Dorothy Collins conceived and put into
execution the bold project of bringing the barber to the house.
Probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's
conversation might put the finishing touches to it. There were in
fact two barbers, one of the old town, one of the new. "I once
planned," he says, "a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in
several volumes, which was to be called 'The Two Barbers of
Beaconsfield' and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent
citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed
belong to two different civilisations."

Despite his love for London, Gilbert had always felt that life in a
country town held one point of special superiority--in it you
discovered the Community. In London you chose your friends--which
meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind. He had noted
in the family itself a valuable widening:

The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into
a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we
have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us
and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a
surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt
from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being
born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world
which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without
us, into a world that we have not made.*

[* _Heretics_, pp. 191-2.]

Here in Beaconsfield the Chestertons grew into the community: the
clergym