or,
though a rather sad and silent, was a companionable and considerate man.
Paynter had even read Treherne's poetry aloud, and he read admirably;
he had also read other things, not aloud, grubbing up everything in the
neighborhood, from guidebooks to epitaphs, that could throw a light on
local antiquities. And it was that evening when the lamplight and the
last daylight had kindled the colors of the wine and silver on the table
under the tree, that he announced a new discovery.

"Say, Squire," he remarked, with one of his rare Americanisms, "about
those bogey trees of yours; I don't believe you know half the tales told
round here about them. It seems they have a way of eating things. Not
that I have any ethical objection to eating things," he continued,
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--"

"Well, the two tales are reconcilable enough," put in the poet quietly.
"If there we