aunted by mere constitutional
queerness. The other doctor, being the prosecutor and a boarder, has no
choice in the matter. The doctors, it should be added, have brought with
them a mass of documentary evidence, incriminating Smith.

How the defence has time to collect this evidence is not explained, but
this is just one of the all-important details which do not matter in the
Chestertonian plane. Smith is tried for attempted murder. The
prosecution fails because the evidence shows Smith to be a first-class
shot, who has on occasion fired life into people by frightening them.
Then he is tried for burglary on the basis of a clergyman's letter from
which it is gathered that Smith tried one night to induce him and
another cleric to enter a house burglariously in the dark. This charge
breaks down because a letter is produced from the other clergyman who
did actually accompany Smith over housetops and down through
trap-doors--into his own house! Smith, it is explained, is in the habit
of keeping himself awake to the romance and wonder of everyday existence
by such courses. From the second letter, however, it appears that there
is a Mrs. Smith, so the next charge is one of desertion and attempted
bigamy. A series of documents is produced, from persons in France,
Russia, China, and California recounting conversations with Smith, a man
with a garden-rake, who left his house so that he might find it, and at
the end leapt over the hedge into the garden where Mrs. Smith was having
tea. In the words of the servant "he looked round at the garden and
said, very loud and strong: 'Oh, what a lovely place you've got,' just
as if he'd never seen it before." After which the court proceeds to try
Smith on a polygamy charge. Documentary evidence shows that Smith has
at one time or another married a Miss Green, a Miss Brown, a Miss Black,
just as he is now about to marry a Miss Gray, Moon points out that these
are all the same lady. Innocent Smith has merely broken the conventions,
he has religiously kept the commandments. He has burgled his own house,
and married his own wife. He has been perfectly innocent, and therefore
he has been perfectly merry. Innocent is acquitted, and the book ends.

In the course of _Manalive_, somebody says, "Going right round the world
is the shortest way to where you are already." These are the words of an
overworked epigrammatist, and upon them hangs the whole story. If
_Manalive_ is amusing, it is because Ches