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"Michael Wood"
109

Bending of the Twig" (one of the "seven other tales"), was able to see the curious things the child, Dennis, saw; both were entirely normal and "human." Yet the man March flogged the child for lying, while the boy Perry, sympathizing, dimly understanding, groped for solution, and ultimately was the cause of the man's shame-faced half-surrender. The attitudes of March and Perry are typical of the intolerance, and the finer tolerance, of many thousands of persons, whose lives are touched by manifestations beyond their ability to credit, and while the moral is obviously that furnished Horatio by the Prince of Denmark, it is an excellent one, and the story is admirably done. Other eminently "human" personages enter the tales, although for the most part they serve as foils for more remarkable characters whose prescience goes beyond ordinary experience. David Alison, a lovable individual, a naturalist and author, who occurs in several of the novels, lingers happily in memory as hovering intellectually somewhere between the known and the unknown lands. Certainly, Alison had flung open strange shutters and looked upon secret things, but he was far from "mad"—unless it be madness to loathe commercialism and the city, and to love nature and the fields. And Father Anthony Standish of the House of Peace, a very