helping himself elegantly to green cheese. "But I have more or less,
broadly speaking, an objection to eating people."

"Eating people!" repeated Barbara Vane.

"I know a globe-trotter mustn't be fastidious,"
replied Mr. Paynter. "But I repeat firmly, an objection
to eating people. The peacock trees seem to have progressed
since the happy days of innocence when they only ate peacocks.
If you ask the people here--the fisherman who lives on that beach,
or the man that mows this very lawn in front of us--they'll tell
you tales taller than any tropical one I brought you from the
Barbary Coast. If you ask them what happened to the fisherman Peters,
who got drunk on All Hallows Eve, they'll tell you he lost his way
in that little wood, tumbled down asleep under the wicked trees,
and then--evaporated, vanished, was licked up like dew by the sun.
If you ask them where Harry Hawke is, the widow's little son,
they'll just tell you he's swallowed; that he was dared to climb
the trees and sit there all night, and did it. What the trees did
God knows; the habits of a vegetable ogre leave one a little vague.
But they even add the agreeable detail that a new branch appears
on the tree when somebody has petered out in this style."

"What new nonsense is this?" cried Vane. "I know there's some crazy yarn
about the trees spreading fever, though every educated man knows why
these epidemics return occasionally. And I know they say you can tell
the noise of them among other trees in a gale, and I dare say you can.
But even Cornwall isn't a lunatic asylum, and a tree that dines on
a passing tourist--"