"Oh, blast your--" began the Squire, and 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