in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the
keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree,
practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing
by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about
their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me,
I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the
knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade,
religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so
on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to
say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical
importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour's
animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished
poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit,
and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two
knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that
I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS (this was the real
stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), that
I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping
with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and
well-known in the neighbourhood.

In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last
that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. And
when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me
pass.

"But," I said, "what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue of that
Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like knight-errants. You,
the higher humanitarians, are not deceived by the seeming stillness
of the green things, a stillness like the stillness of the cataract, a
headlong and crashing silence. You know that a tree is but a creature
tied to the ground by one leg. You will not let assassins with their
Swedish daggers shed the green blood of such a being. But if so, why am
I not in custody; where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of your
persons, my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have
just convinced you, that my name is