erhaps
they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are
repeated only in the hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhaps
a man is not startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the air
with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass through
thousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a pine
tree. However this may be, there is something singularly thrilling, even
something urgent and intolerant, about the endless forest repetitions;
there is the hint of something like madness in that musical monotony of
the pines.

I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with sardonic
truth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post."

My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions,
especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one
of its paths which happened to follow the wires of the provincial
telegraphy; and though the poles occurred at long intervals they made a
difference when they came. The instant we came to the straight pole we
could see that the pines were not really straight. It was like a hundred
straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all brought to judgment
suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur lines
seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could have sworn
they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them curve and waver
everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the telegraph
post the pines were crooked--and alive. That lonely vertical rod at once
deformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yet
made it free, like any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly.

"Yes," said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. "You don't know
what a wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees
are straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual
civilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles."

We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day than we
intended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening itself out into
a yellow evening when we came out of the forest on to the hills above
a strange town or village, of which the lights had already begun to
glitter in the darkening valley. The change had already happened which
is the test and definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemed
still as bright, the earth was growing blacker against it, especially
at