s heath; two desolate elms rocked
above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign
of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of
that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
innkeeper standing at an open door.

"How jolly it is," he cried, "to get back to civilization. That notion
that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till
you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and
the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red
star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red
river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I
have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in
enormous quantities."

Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
wind died in the dreary trees.

"You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own
house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth,
and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good
fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I said originally."

"What do you mean?" I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort
of sanity. "What is his greatest virtue?"

"His greatest virtue," replied Basil, "is that he always tells the
literal truth."

"Well, really," cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger,
and slapping himself like a cabman, "he doesn't seem to have been very
literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I
ask, have you brought us out to this infernal place?"

"He was too truthful, I confess," said Basil, leaning against the tree;
"too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in
a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time
we went in. We shall be late for dinner."

Rupert whispered to me with a white face:

"Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
house?"

"I suppose so," I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be
a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as
strange as the wind:

"Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?"

"Why, up here," cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above
our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.

"Come up, all of you," he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice