XII
THE FAIRY TALE OF FATHER BROWN
The picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consists. It had come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history—hardly fifty years before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been not a little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as will soon be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of Germany—those little pantomime paternal monarchies in which a king seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut battlements of the castle, gilt by the sunshine, looked the more like gilt gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam itself could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the colour which a child extracts from a shilling paint-box.
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