The

The Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales. This is your host, John Haggdorn.

Today I have a great story for all you Father Brown fans.

This one from G.K. Chesterton's collection, The Wisdom of Father Brown, is called The Absence

of Mr. Glass.

The consulting rooms of Dr. Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain

moral disorders, lay along the sea front at Scarborough

in a series of very large and well-lighted French windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble.

In such a place, the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado.

For the chambers themselves were ruled

throughout by terrible tidiness, not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be

supposed that Dr. Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there,

in their place, but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place.

Luxury was there. There stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars,

but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the wall and the

mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a

liqueur excellence, stood always on this table of luxury. But the fanciful have asserted that the

whiskey, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there. The left-hand

corner of the room was lined with his complete a set of English classics as the right-hand could show of English and foreign physiologists.

But if one took a volume of Schosser or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth.

One could not say the books were never read. Probably they were,

but there was a sense of there being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches.

...