out of his attic," yet it would
appear elsewhere that he walked abroad often enough. The essentials of
this unprecedented detective are, however, sufficiently tangible. He had
been a K.C. and a judge. He had left the Bench because it annoyed him,
and because he held the very human but not legitimate belief that some
criminals would be better off with a trip to the seaside than with a
sentence of imprisonment. After his retirement from public life he stuck
to his old trade as the judge of a Voluntary Criminal Court. "My
criminals were tried for the faults which really make social life
impossible. They were tried before me for selfishness, or for an
impossible vanity, or for scandal-mongering, or for stinginess to guests
or dependents." It is regrettable that Chesterton does not grant us a
glimpse of this fascinating tribunal at work. However, it is Grant's
job, on the strength of which he becomes the president and founder of
the C.Q.T.--Club of Queer Trades. Among the members of this Club are a
gentleman who runs an Adventure and Romance Agency for supplying thrills
to the bourgeois, two Professional Detainers, and an Agent for Arboreal
Villas, who lets off a variety of birds' nest. The way in which these
people go about their curious tasks invariably suggests a crime to
Rupert Grant, Basil's amateur detective brother, whereupon Basil has to
intervene to put matters right. The author does not appear to have been
struck by the inconsistency of setting Basil to work to ferret out the
doings of his fellow club-members. The book is, in fact, full of joyous
inconsistencies. The Agent for Arboreal Villas is clearly unqualified
for the membership of the Club. Professor Chadd has no business there
either. He is elected on the strength of having invented a language
expressed by dancing, but it appears that he is really an employee in
the Asiatic MSS. Department of the British Museum. Things are extremely
absurd in _The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady_. At the instigation
of Rupert, who has heard sighs of pain coming out of a South Kensington
basement, Basil, Rupert, and the man who tells the story, break into the
house and violently assault those whom they meet.

Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three
blows like battering-rams knocked the footman into
a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows,
with one antimacassar in his hand and another in
his teeth, and bou