blood and I will try to say it. Could you not have trusted a little
these peasants whom you already trust so much? These men are men, and
they meant something; even their fathers were not wholly fools. If your
gardener told you of the trees you called him a madman, but he did
not plan and plant your garden like a madman. You would not trust your
woodman about these trees, yet you trusted him with all the others. Have
you ever thought what all the work of the world would be like if the
poor were so senseless as you think them? But no, you stuck to your
rational principle. And your rational principle was that a thing must
be false because thousands of men had found it true; that BECAUSE many
human eyes had seen something it could not be there."

He looked across at Ashe with a sort of challenge, but though the
sea wind ruffled the old lawyer's red mane, his Napoleonic mask was
unruffled; it even had a sort of beauty from its new benignity.

"I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been," he
answered, "to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories. And yet, in
justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur to your sweeping
inference. I respect these peasants, I respect your regard for them; but
their stories are a different matter. I think I would do anything for
them but believe them. Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them,
when in the more instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have
considered what would be involved in taking their word for anything.
Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now; and
kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn a witch. No,
doctor, I admit these people have been badly used, I admit they are in
many ways our betters, but I still could not accept anything in their
evidence."

The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then, for the last
time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.

"Quite so," he said. "But you would have hanged me on their evidence."

And, turning his back on them, as if automatically, he set his face
toward the village, where for so many years he had gone his round.

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