“That is transcendental moonshine, and you don’t believe a word of it!”

Well, my friend, allow me, then, to tell you, in all charity and with bowels of compassion, that you hold dangerous and fatal views respecting one of the cardinal doctrines of mythology,—­yes, to be plain, you are a Joveless infidel, and in fearful danger of being locked out of Elysium; and I shall offer up a smoking sacrifice, the next time I get a sirloin, and pour out a solemn libation, in the presence of my whole family seated around the domestic altar early in the morning, for your speedy conversion.

Know, then, O obtuse, faithless, and perverse skeptic, that these things are so:  that ocular and auricular evidence, indubitable and overwhelming, exists, that the arboreal and human natures are in substance one.  Know that once on a time, as Daphne, the lovely daughter of Peneus, was amusing herself with a bow and arrows in a forest of Thessaly, she was surprised by a rude musician named Phoebus.  Timid and bashful, as most young ladies are, she turned and fled as fast as her [Greek:  skelae] could carry her.  After running, closely pursued by the eager Delphian, for several miles, and becoming very much fatigued, she felt inclined to yield:  but wishing to faint in a reputable manner, she lifted up her hands and asked the gods to help her.  Her call was heard in a jiffy, and quicker than you could say, “Presto:  change!” she was a Laurel-tree, which Phoebus married on the spot.  This was the Eve of the Laurel family, so that all these trees you meet in the world at present must be rational beings, since they are the descendants of the beautiful Greek maiden Daphne.  And to satisfy you that this is no foolish legend, but, on the contrary, a well-authenticated fact, clinched and riveted in the boiler-head of historical truth, permit me to assure you,—­for I have seen it myself,—­that in the Villa Borghese, near Rome in Italy, is an exact representation of the wonderful incident, cut in Carrara marble,—­the bark of the Laurel growing over the vanishing girl, and her hands and fingers sprouting into branches and leaves,—­supposed to have been copied from a photograph taken on the spot,—­for there is a photograph in existence exactly like the marble statue.

We know positively—­for we have an equally minute account of the transaction—­that the Cypress originated in a similar way.  And is it not reasonable to infer, therefore, though we may not find the facts stated in every case, that all trees were created out of men and women, their bodies being miraculously clothed in woody tissue?  In the time of Virgil this was certainly the established orthodox belief; for he relates an anecdote, expressing no doubt whatever of its truth, of a party of travellers who commenced one day in a forest the indiscriminate destruction of some young trees, when their roots forthwith began to bleed, and voices proceeded from them, begging to be spared from laceration.  And, in fact, hundreds of instances, similarly weighty as evidence, from equally veracious and trustworthy classic authors, might be cited to the point, did time and space permit.  But we hasten to the other proof of their essential humanity, which I set out with assuming as an undoubted fact, and which is already foreshadowed in the adventure of the Trojan wanderers just related,—­namely, that they possess the faculty of speech.