nd then replaced the more apt and
alliterative word "Bible" by the general word "superstition." He was
himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to set his tenants
an example. Of what, it would have puzzled him to say.

A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountered a
woodcutter, one Martin, who was more explicit, having more of a
grievance. His daughter was at that time seriously ill with a fever
recently common on that coast, and the Squire, who was a kind-hearted
gentleman, would normally have made allowances for low spirits and loss
of temper. But he came near to losing his own again when the peasant
persisted in connecting his tragedy with the traditional monomania about
the foreign trees.

"If she were well enough I'd move her," said the woodcutter, "as we
can't move them, I suppose. I'd just like to get my chopper into them
and feel 'em come crashing down."

"One would think they were dragons," said Vane.

"And that's about what they look like," replied Martin. "Look at 'em!"

The woodman was naturally a rougher and even wilder figure than the
gardener. His face also was brown, and looked like an antique parchment,
and it was framed in an outlandish arrangement of raven beard and
whiskers, which was really a fashion fifty years ago, but might have
been five thousand years old or older. Phoenicians, one felt, trading on
those strange shores in the morning of the world, might have combed or
curled or braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns.
For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall as
Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race, small and
interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older than the Vane
family, though that was old as county families go. For in many such
parts of England it is the aristocrats who are the latest arrivals. It
was the sort of racial type that is supposed to be passing, and perhaps
has already passed.

The obnoxious objects stood some hundred yards away from the speaker,
who waved toward them with his ax; and there was something suggestive in
the comparison. That coast, to begin with, stretching toward the sunset,
was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud. It was cut out against
the emerald or indigo of the sea in graven horns and crescents that
might be the cast or mold of some such crested serpents; and, beneath,
was pierced and fretted by caves and crevices, as if by the boring of
some such