BY ANTHONY HOPE





It was a charmingly mild and balmy day. The sun shone beyond the
orchard, and the shade was cool inside. A light breeze stirred the
boughs of the old apple-tree under which the philosopher sat. None
of these things did the philosopher notice, unless it might be when
the wind blew about the leaves of the large volume on his knees,
and he had to find his place again. Then he would exclaim against
the wind, shuffle the leaves till he got the right page, and settle to
his reading. The book was a treatise on ontology; it was written
by another philosopher, a friend of this philosopher's; it bristled
with fallacies, and this philosopher was discovering them all, and
noting them on the fly-leaf at the end. He was not going to review
the book (as some might have thought from his behaviour), or
even to answer it in a work of his own. It was just that he found
a pleasure in stripping any poor fallacy naked and crucifying it.
Presently a girl in a white frock came into the orchard. She picked
up an apple, bit it, and found it ripe. Holding it in her hand,
she walked up to where the philosopher sat, and looked at him. He
did not stir. She took a bite out of the apple, munched it, and
swallowed it. The philosopher crucified a fallacy on the fly-leaf.
The girl flung the apple away.

"Mr. Jerningham," said she, "are you very busy?"