And yet in that short walk between the green turf and the yellow sands he was destined to find, his hard-headedness provoked into a not unfamiliar phase which the world was inclined to call hot-headedness.  The fact was that the Cornish peasantry, who composed his tenantry and domestic establishment, were far from being people with no nonsense about them.  There was, alas! a great deal of nonsense about them; with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin, they seemed to surround him with a fairy ring of nonsense.  But the magic circle had one center:  there was one point in which the curving conversation of the rustics always returned.  It was a point that always pricked the Squire to exasperation, and even in this short walk he seemed to strike it everywhere.  He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to speak to the gardener about potting some foreign shrubs, and the gardener seemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of his leathery brown visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formed a low opinion of foreign shrubs.

“We wish you’d get rid of what you’ve got here, sir,” he observed, digging doggedly.  “Nothing’ll grow right with them here.”

“Shrubs!” said the Squire, laughing.  “You don’t call the peacock trees shrubs, do you?  Fine tall trees—­you ought to be proud of them.”

“Ill weeds grow apace,” observed the gardener.  “Weeds can grow as houses when somebody plants them.”  Then he added:  “Him that sowed tares in the Bible, Squire.”

“Oh, blast your—­” began the Squire, and then replaced the more apt and alliterative word “Bible” by the general word “superstition.”  He was himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to set his tenants an example.  Of what, it would have puzzled him to say.

A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountered a woodcutter, one Martin, who was more explicit, having more of a grievance.  His daughter was at that time seriously ill with a fever recently common on that coast, and the Squire, who was a kind-hearted gentleman, would normally have made allowances for low spirits and loss of temper.  But he came near to losing his own again when the peasant persisted in connecting his tragedy with the traditional monomania about the foreign trees.

“If she were well enough I’d move her,” said the woodcutter, “as we can’t move them, I suppose.  I’d just like to get my chopper into them and feel ’em come crashing down.”

“One would think they were dragons,” said Vane.

“And that’s about what they look like,” replied Martin.  “Look at ’em!”