Possibly owing to some personal disinclination towards violent bodily exertion on the part of his creator, _Father Brown_, the criminal investigator of Mr. G. K. CHESTERTON'S fancy, is not a fellow of panther-like physique. For him no sudden pouncing on the frayed carpet-edge, or the broken collar-stud dyed with gore. He carries no lens and no revolver. Flashes of psychological insight are more to him than a meticulous examination of the window-sill. When the motive is instantly transparent, why bother about the murderer's boots? In the circumstances it is perhaps fortunate for the reverend sleuth that he nearly always happens to be in either at the death or immediately after it, instead of being summoned a day or two later when the grotesque circumstances of the crime have baffled the panting ingenuity of Scotland Yard. You find him now in this part of England, and now in that, now in America, and now in Italy. He is, in fact, a hedge-priest and has not even a cure of souls in Baker Street. But wherever he goes with his flapping hat and his umbrella he chances on some fantasy of guilt. Yet any pangs we may feel for the absence of the familiar setting--the pale-faced butler in the guarded dining-room of the country-house and the staggered minions of the local constabulary--are assuaged by the brilliant narrative manner in which _The Wisdom of Father Brown_ (CASSELL) is set forth. Here is the paradoxical world of Mr. CHESTERTON'S imagination described in his own verbiage and proved by actual and grisly events. In that starry dream of a detective story which I sometimes have, where sleuth-hounds are pattering along the Milky Way and pursue at last the Great Bear to his den, _Father Brown_ and _Sherlock Holmes_, the one spectacled, the other lynx-eyed, are following the prey in leash. * * * * *