The Man Who Knew Too Much
Ashe, "that you support the miraculous claims of St. Securis in this case. Do you, by any chance, believe in the walking trees?"
"I see men as trees walking," answered the poet, "like the man cured of blindness in the Gospel. By the way, do I understand that you support the miraculous claims of that—thaumaturgist?"
Paynter intervened swiftly and suavely. "Now that sounds a fascinating piece of psychology. You see men as trees?"
"As I can't imagine why men should walk, I can't imagine why trees shouldn't," answered Treherne.
"Obviously, it is the nature of the organism," interposed the medical guest, Dr. Burton Brown; "it is necessary in the very type of vegetable structure."
"In other words, a tree sticks in the mud from year's end to year's end," answered Treherne. "So do you stop in your consulting room from ten to eleven every day. And don't you fancy a fairy, looking in at your window for a flash after having just jumped over the moon and played mulberry bush with the Pleiades, would think you were a vegetable structure, and that sitting still was the nature of the organism?"
"I don't happen to believe in fairies," said the doctor rather stiffly, for the argumentum ad hominem was becoming too common. A sulphur-
280
