Indeed there is here a curious aptness in the quaint simplicity

of his childish rhyme that ran, "My bed is like a little boat."

Through all his varied experiences his bed was a boat and his boat was

a bed. Panoramas of tropic palm and Californian orange-grove passed

over that moving couch like the long nightmare of the nursery walls.

But his real courage was not so much turned outwards to the drama

of the boat as inwards to the drama of the bed. Nobody knew

better than he did that nothing is more terrible than a bed;

since it is always waiting to be a deathbed.



G. K. CHESTERTON