hat nightmare feeling
that you don't know whether the hero is a plant or a man or a devil.
Don't you feel it sometimes in 'Uncle Remus'?"

"True," said Paynter. "Perfectly true." And he looked at the lawyer with
a new interest. The lawyer, who had been introduced as Mr. Ashe, was one
of those people who are more worth looking at than most people realize
when they look. If Napoleon had been red-haired, and had bent all his
powers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a province,
he might have looked much the same; the head with the red hair was heavy
and powerful; the figure in its dark, quiet clothes was comparatively
insignificant, as was Napoleon's. He seemed more at ease in the Squire's
society than the doctor, who, though a gentleman, was a shy one, and a
mere shadow of his professional brother.

"As you truly say," remarked Paynter, "the story seems touched with
quite barbarous elements, probably Negro. Originally, though, I think
there was really a hagiological story about some hermit, though some
of the higher critics say St. Securis never existed, but was only an
allegory of arboriculture, since his name is the Latin for an ax."

"Oh, if you come to that," remarked the poet Treherne, "you might as
well say Squire Vane doesn't exist, and that he's only an allegory for
a weathercock." Something a shade too cool about this sally drew the
lawyer's red brows together. He looked across the table and met the
poet's somewhat equivocal smile.

"Do I understand, Mr. Treherne," asked Ashe, "that you support the
miraculous claims of St. Securis in this case. Do you, by any chance,
believe in the walking trees?"

"I see men as trees walking," answered the poet, "like the man cured of
blindness in the Gospel. By the way, do I understand that you support
the miraculous claims of that--thaumaturgist?"

Paynter intervened swiftly and suavely. "Now that sounds a fascinating
piece of psychology. You see men as trees?"

"As I can't imagine why men should walk, I can't imagine why trees
shouldn't," answered Treherne.

"Obviously, it is the nature of the organism", interposed the medical
guest, Dr. Burton Brown; "it is necessary in the very type of vegetable
structure."

"In other words, a tree sticks in the mud from year's end to year's
end," answered Treherne. "So do you stop in your consulting room from
ten to eleven every day. And don't you fancy a fairy, looking in at your
window for a flash after havi