ners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle,
putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the
cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger
than when he went in.

In the early days of their acquaintance Wells remembers meeting the
whole Chesterton family in the street of a French town and inviting
them to lunch. His own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room
for a moment when Wells exclaimed: "Where's Frank? Good God, Gilbert,
you're sitting on him."

The anxious way in which Gilbert got up and turned apologetically
towards his own chair was unforgettable. An absent-minded man who in
a gesture of politeness once gave his seat to three ladies in a bus
might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him.

In his memoirs Wells relates another pleasing story of a
Chestertonian encounter:

I once saw [Henry] James quarrelling with his brother William
James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly
unnerved. He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on
what was and what was not permissible in England. William was arguing
about it in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked
reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James
and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's
passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life and he was
immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had
its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House,
G. K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our
vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a
scandalous directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that
ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over!

Henry had caught him at it. It was the sort of thing that isn't
done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't
done. . . . Henry instructed the gardener to put away that ladder and
William was looking thoroughly naughty about it.

To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road
just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for
a drive in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather
swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he
descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we
chatted in the road and