always argued, they never quarrelled.

There was also a little sister Beatrice who died when Gilbert was
very young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a
rocking-horse more clearly than he remembered her death, and in his
memory linked with the fall the sense of loss and sorrow that came
with the death.

It would be impossible to tell the story of his childhood one half
so well as he has told it himself. It is the best part of his
Autobiography. Indeed, it is one of the best childhoods in
literature. For Gilbert Chesterton most perfectly remembered the
exact truth, not only about what happened to a child, but about how
a child thought and felt. What is more, he sees childhood not as an
isolated fragment or an excursion into fairyland, but as his "real
life; the real beginnings of what should have been a more real life;
a lost experience in the land of the living."

I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now,
that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of
the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with
dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown
man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who
has his head in a cloud.*

[* _Autobiography_, p. 49.]

Here are the beginnings of the man's philosophy in the life and
experience of the child. He was living in a world of reality, and
that reality was beautiful, in the clear light of "an eternal