The God of the Gongs (The Father Brown Classics, Episode 21)

"The God of the Gongs" by G.K. Chesterton is a Father Brown story: It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamppost that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamppost.