d sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to
apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me."

"I can see him now," wrote Mr. Fordham, "very tall and lanky,
striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes
scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything
he passed; but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one
who not only observed but remembered what he had seen." It was only
of himself that he was really oblivious.

Mr. Oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they
filled his pockets with snow in the playground. When class
reassembled, the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor.
A small boy raised his hand: "Please Sir, I think the laboratory sink
must be leaking again. The water is coming through and falling all
over Chesterton."

The laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been
short-sighted. "Chesterton," he said, "go up to Mr. ---- and ask him
with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put
right immediately." Gilbert, with water still streaming from both
pockets, obediently went upstairs, gave the message and returned
without discovering what had happened.

The boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time an
extraordinary respect, both for his intellectual acquirements and for
his moral character. One boy, who rather prided himself in private
life on being a man about town, stopped him one day in the passage
and said solemnly, "Chesterton, I am an abandoned profligate." G.K.
replied, "I'm sorry to hear it." "We watched our talk," one of them
said to me, "when he was with us." His home and upbringing were felt
by some of his schoolfellows to have definitely a Puritan tinge about
them, although on the other hand the more Conservative elements
regarded them as politically dangerous. Mr. Oldershaw relates that
his own father, who was a Conservative in politics and had also
joined the Catholic Church, seriously warned him against the
Agnosticism and Republicanism of the Chesterton household. But even
at this age his schoolfellows recognised that he had begun the great
quest of his life. "We felt," said Oldershaw, "that he was looking
for God."

I suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that
produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to
pack Gilbert's pockets with snow; but it was also the fact that he
was observing