Page:Chesterton - The Club of Queer Trades.djvu/30

The Club of Queer Trades the major, attired in his usual faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discolored appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether so in the major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a barrow which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid specimens of almost every order, but the major's own favorite pansies predominated. The major stopped and fell into conversation, and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors and other mad men—that is to say, he carefully 16