re a magic that killed men when they came close, it's likely
to strike them with sickness when they stand far off. In the old romance
the dragon, that devours people, often blasts others with a sort of
poisonous breath."

Ashe looked across at the speaker steadily, not to say stonily.

"Do I understand," he inquired, "that you swallow the swallowing trees
too?"

Treherne's dark smile was still on the defensive; his fencing always
annoyed the other, and he seemed not without malice in the matter.

"Swallowing is a metaphor," he said, "about me, if not about the trees.
And metaphors take us at once into dreamland--no bad place, either. This
garden, I think, gets more and more like a dream at this corner of the
day and night, that might lead us anywhere."

The yellow horn of the moon had appeared silently and as if suddenly
over the black horns of the seaweed, seeming to announce as night
something which till then had been evening. A night breeze came in
between the trees and raced stealthily across the turf, and as they
ceased speaking they heard, not only the seething grass, but the sea
itself move and sound in all the cracks and caves round them and below
them and on every side. They all felt the note that had been struck--the
American as an art critic and the poet as a poet; and the Squire, who
believed himself boiling with an impatience purely rational, did not
really understand his own impatience. In him, more perhaps than the
others--more certainly than he knew himself--the sea wind went to the
head like wine.

"Credulity is a curious thing," went on Treherne in a low voice. "It
is more negative than positive, and yet it is infinite. Hundreds of men
will avoid walking under a ladder; they don't know where the door of the
ladder will lead. They don't really think God would throw a thunderbolt
at them for such a thing. They don't know what would happen, that is
just the point; but yet they step aside as from a precipice. So the poor
people here may or may not believe anything; they don't go into those
trees at night."

"I walk under a ladder whenever I can," cried Vane, in quite unnecessary
excitement.

"You belong to a Thirteen Club," said the poet. "You walk under a ladder
on Friday to dine thirteen at a table, everybody spilling the salt. But
even you don't go into those trees at night."

Squire Vane stood up, his silver hair flaming in the wind.

"I'll stop all night in your tomfool wood and up your to