Page:Chesterton - The Club of Queer Trades.djvu/29

Adventures of Major Brown neat villa, very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad water-color), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbor in heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two an other; he saw life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventures such as he had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle or the heart of battle.

One certain bright and windy afternoon, 15