ion as made in the year 1900 by Lucian
Oldershaw, who was living at the time with Hammond. Mr. Oldershaw
usually has the accuracy of the hero-worshipper and upon this matter
he adds several amusing details. For some time he had been trying to
get the group on the _Speaker_ to read Chesterton and had in vain
taken several articles to the office. Mr. Eccles declared the
handwriting was that of a Jew and he prejudiced Belloc, says
Oldershaw, against reading "anything written by my Jew friend."

But when at last they did meet, Belloc "opened the conversation by
saying in his most pontifical manner, 'Chesterton, you wr-r-ite very
well.'" Chesterton was then 26, Belloc four years older. It was at
the Mont Blanc, a restaurant in Gerrard St., Soho, and the meeting
was celebrated with a bottle of Moulin au Vent.

The first description given by Gilbert himself is at once earlier and
more vivid than the better known one in the _Autobiography_.

When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us
that he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more
uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked
into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things.
When I have said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not
merely _bons mots_, I have said all that can be said in the most
serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good
things of all the men of my time.

We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho
restaurant; his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist
and French Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes,
which are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. . . .

The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt
for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about
the South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most
of us were writing on the _Speaker_. . . .

. . . What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door
there entered with him the smell of danger.*

[* Introduction to: _Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work_ by C. C.
Mandell and E. Shanks, 1916.]

"It was from that dingy little Soho cafe," Chesterton writes in the
_Autobiography_, "that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed
monster M