. Doctor wouldn't let me pick it up, when I wanted to pick it up;
and now they've got it, like they've got the Squire. Wood and iron, wood
and iron, but eating it's nothing to them."

"Come!" said Paynter kindly, remembering the man's domestic trouble.
"Miss Vane will see you have anything you want, I know. And look
here, don't brood on all those stories about the Squire. Is there the
slightest trace of the trees having anything to do with it? Is there
even this extra branch the idiots talked about?"

There had been growing on Paynter the suspicion that the man before him
was not perfectly sane; yet he was much more startled by the sudden and
cold sanity that looked for an instant out of the woodman's eyes, as he
answered in his ordinary manner.

"Well, sir, did you count the branches before?"

Then he seemed to relapse; and Paynter left him wandering and wavering
in the undergrowth; and entered the wood like one across whose sunny
path a shadow has fallen for an instant.

Diving under the wood, he was soon threading a leafy path which, even
under that summer sun, shone only with an emerald twilight, as if it
were on the floor of the sea. It wound about more shakily than he had
supposed, as if resolved to approach the central trees as if they were
the heart of the maze at Hampton Court. They were the heart of the maze
for him, anyhow; he sought them as straight as a crooked road would
carry him; and, turning a final corner, he beheld, for the first time,
the foundations of those towers of vegetation he had as yet only seen
from above, as they stood waist-high in the woodland. He found the
suspicion correct which supposed the tree branched from one great
root, like a candelabrum; the fork, though stained and slimy with green
fungoids, was quite near the ground, and offered a first foothold. He
put his foot in it, and without a flash of hesitation went aloft, like
Jack climbing the Bean stalk.

Above him the green roof of leaves and boughs seemed sealed like a
firmament of foliage; but, by bending and breaking the branches to
right and left he slowly forced a passage upward; and had at last, and
suddenly, the sensation coming out on the top of the world. He felt
as if he had never been in the open air before. Sea and land lay in a
circle below and about him, as he sat astride a branch of the tall tree;
he was almost surprised to see the sun still comparatively low in the
sky; as if he were looking over a land of ete