And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone. The one1 Classic Short Stories and Tales.

This is your host, John Hagenorn.

Today, another G.K. Chesterton, Father Brown's story,

this one called The Wrong Shape. And now our story. Certain of the great roads going north out of

London continue far into the country, a sort of attenuated and interrupted specter

of a street, with great gaps in the building but preserving

the line. Here will be a group of shops followed by a fenced field or paddock and then a famous

public house and then perhaps a market garden or a nursery

garden, and then one large private house, and then another field and another inn, and so on. If anyone walked along one of these roads he will

pass a house which will probably catch his eye though he may not be able to

explain his attraction. It is a long, low house running parallel with the road, painted mostly white and pale green, with a veranda and sunblines, and porches kept with those quaint sort of cupulas like wooden umbrellas that one sees in some old-fashioned houses.

In fact, it is an old-fashioned house, very English and very suburban in a good old wealthy Clapham sense.

And yet the house has a look of having been built cheaply for the hot weather.

Looking at its white paint and sunblines, one thinks vaguely of pugarese and even of palm trees.

I cannot trace the feeling to its root.

Perhaps the place was built by an Anglo-Indian.

Anyone passing this house, I say, would be namelessly fascinated by it.

Would feel that it was a place about which some story was to be told. And he would have been right, as you shall shortly hear.

For this is the story, the story of the strange things that did really happen in it in the Wittsentide in the year 1883.

Anyone passing the house on a Thursday before Witts Sunday at about half past 4 p.m.

would have seen the front door open and Father Brown of the

small Church of St. Mungo come out smoking a large pipe in company with a very

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