G K Chesterton pdf Tremendous Trifles: Original Text

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the front garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden was about the same size as thedinner table; it consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some mysteriouspieces of cork standing up in the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. Onemorning while they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probablythe milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation. Theboys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply interested in his remarks. Forthe milkman (who was, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering themin the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And Paul closed with the offerwith a business-like abruptness, explaining that he had long wished to be a giant that hemight stride across continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in anafternoon dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket, waved it ina hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the model villa with its front gardenwas like a tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away with his headabove the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden;and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. Hewandered round the world for several minutes trying to find something really large andfinding everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fellasleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual backwoodsmanwho came out of it at that moment with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-CatholicPhilosophy in the other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at thebook again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil of pride consists inbeing out of proportion to the universe." So the backwoodsman put down his book, took hisaxe and, working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there wasan end of hi