or not!
What the devil has that to do with you, or with me in dealing with
the facts I do know? My own instinct is to think there is; that if my
researches could be followed far enough it would be found that some
horrible parody of hay fever, some effect analogous to that of pollen,
would explain all the facts. I have never found the explanation. What
I have found are the facts. And the fact is that those trees on the
top there dealt death right and left, as certainly as if they had been
giants, standing on a hill and knocking men down in crowds with a club.
It will be said that now I had only to produce my proofs and have the
nuisance removed. Perhaps I might have convinced the scientific world
finally, when more and more processions of dead men had passed
through the village to the cemetery. But I had not got to convince the
scientific world, but the Lord of the Manor. The Squire will pardon my
saying that it was a very different thing. I tried it once; I lost
my temper, and said things I do not defend; and I left the Squire's
prejudices rooted anew, like the trees. I was confronted with one
colossal coincidence that was an obstacle to all my aims. One thing made
all my science sound like nonsense. It was the popular legend.

"Squire, if there were a legend of hay fever, you would not believe in
hay fever. If there were a popular story about pollen, you would say
that pollen was only a popular story. I had something against me heavier
and more hopeless than the hostility of the learned; I had the support
of the ignorant. My truth was hopelessly tangled up with a tale that
the educated were resolved to regard as entirely a lie. I never tried to
explain again; on the contrary, I apologized, affected a conversion to
the common-sense view, and watched events. And all the time the lines of
a larger, if more crooked plan, began to get clearer in my mind. I knew
that Miss Vane, whether or no she were married to Mr. Treherne, as I
afterward found she was, was so much under his influence that the first
day of her inheritance would be the last day of the poisonous trees.
But she could not inherit, or even interfere, till the Squire died. It
became simply self-evident, to a rational mind, that the Squire must
die. But wishing to be humane as well as rational, I desired his death
to be temporary.

"Doubtless my scheme was completed by a chapter of accidents, but I was
watching for such accidents. Thus I had a foreshadowing of h