an, the doctor, the inn-keeper, the barber, the gardener. And
like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens
seemed to Gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest.
Discussing an event of much later date--a meeting to decide whether a
crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial--he thus describes
the immense forces he found in that small place:

Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants
of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank
manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place, with a few
hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of
journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the
spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history;
Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the
East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the
Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under
Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for
Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before
the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of
that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.*

[* _Autobiography_, p. 244.]

A keen observer often added to the Beaconsfield community in those
days was Father (now Monsignor) John O'Connor, close friend of both
Gilbert and Frances and inspirer of "Father Brown" of detective fame.
They had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a
friend in Keighley, Yorkshire, and walked back over the moors
together to visit Francis Steinthal at Ilkley. This Jew, of Frankfort
descent, was a great friend of the Chestertons and on their many
visits to him the friendship with Father O'Connor ripened. With both
Frances and Gilbert it was among the closest of their lives. Their
letters to him show it: the long talks, and companionable walks over
the moors, have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more
convincing because so little stressed in his book. Father O'Connor
has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas
to Gilbert, he takes pleasure in his character of "Father Brown," but
he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the
very absence of all parade of it.

Both he and Gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the
detective priest firs