Mr. Sanderson merely suggests—poetically, my dear, of course—that these may be manifestations of life, though life at a different stage to ours.'

' The " breath of life," we read, " He breathed into them." These things do not breathe.' She said it with triumph.

Then Sanderson put in a word. But he spoke rather to himself or to his host than by way of serious rejoinder to the ruffled lady.

' But plants do breathe too, you know,' he said. 4 They breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their environment as men and animals do. They have a nervous system too ... at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells. They may have memory too. Certainly, they know definite action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological, no one has proved that it is only that, and not—psychological.'

He did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind the yellow shawl. Bittacy cleared his throat, threw his extinguished cigar upon the lawn, crossed and recrossed his legs.

' And in trees,' continued the other, * behind a great forest, for instance,' pointing towards the woods, * may stand a rather splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees—some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organised as our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by being it, for a time at least. It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a

big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming.'

The mouth of Mrs. Bittacy was heard to close with a snap. Her shawl, and particularly her crackling dress, exhaled the protest that burned within her like a pain. She was too distressed to be overawed, but at the same time too confused 'mid the litter of words and meanings half understood, to find immediate phrases she could use. Whatever the actual meaning of his language might be, however, and whatever subtle dangers lay concealed behind them meanwhile, they certainly wove a kind of gentle spell with the glimmering darkness that held all three delicately enmeshed there by that open window. The odours of dewy lawn, flowers, trees, and earth formed part of it.

' The moods,' he continued, ' that people waken in us are due to their hidden life affecting our own. Deep calls to deep. A person, for instance, joins you in an empty room : you both instantly change. The new arrival, though in silence, has caused a change of mood. May not the moods of Nature touch and stir us in virtue of a similar prerogative ? The sea, the hills, the desert, wake passion, joy, terror, as the case may be ; for a few, perhaps,' he glanced significantly at his host so that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes, ' emotions of a curious, flaming splendour that are quite nameless. Well . . . whence come these powers ? Surely from nothing that is ... dead ! Does not the influence of a forest, its sway and strange ascendancy over certain minds, betray a direct manifestation of life ? It lies otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big woods. Some natures, of course, deliberately invite it. The authority of a host of

THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED 33

trees,'—his voice grew almost solemn as he said the words—* is something not to be denied.