way, somebody will cry:  ‘But do you believe it was supernatural then?’ In fact, that’s what you’ll all say; and that’s exactly what I complain of.  I fancy hundreds of men have been left dead and diseases left undiscovered, by this suspicion of superstition, this stupid fear of fear.  Unless you see daylight through the forest of facts from the first, you won’t venture into the wood at all.  Unless we can promise you beforehand that there shall be what you call a natural explanation, to save your precious dignity from miracles, you won’t even hear the beginning of the plain tale.  Suppose there isn’t a natural explanation!  Suppose there is, and we never find it!  Suppose I haven’t a notion whether there is or not!  What the devil has that to do with you, or with me in dealing with the facts I do know?  My own instinct is to think there is; that if my researches could be followed far enough it would be found that some horrible parody of hay fever, some effect analogous to that of pollen, would explain all the facts.  I have never found the explanation.  What I have found are the facts.  And the fact is that those trees on the top there dealt death right and left, as certainly as if they had been giants, standing on a hill and knocking men down in crowds with a club.  It will be said that now I had only to produce my proofs and have the nuisance removed.  Perhaps I might have convinced the scientific world finally, when more and more processions of dead men had passed through the village to the cemetery.  But I had not got to convince the scientific world, but the Lord of the Manor.  The Squire will pardon my saying that it was a very different thing.  I tried it once; I lost my temper, and said things I do not defend; and I left the Squire’s prejudices rooted anew, like the trees.  I was confronted with one colossal coincidence that was an obstacle to all my aims.  One thing made all my science sound like nonsense.  It was the popular legend.

“Squire, if there were a legend of hay fever, you would not believe in hay fever.  If there were a popular story about pollen, you would say that pollen was only a popular story.  I had something against me heavier and more hopeless than the hostility of the learned; I had the support of the ignorant.  My truth was hopelessly tangled up with a tale that the educated were resolved to regard as entirely a lie.  I never tried to explain again; on the contrary, I apologized, affected a conversion to the common-sense view, and watched events.  And all the time the lines of a larger, if more crooked plan, began to get clearer in my mind.  I knew that Miss Vane, whether or no she were married to Mr. Treherne, as I afterward found she was, was so much under his influence that the first day of her inheritance would be the last day of the poisonous trees.  But she could not inherit, or even interfere, till the Squire died.  It became simply self-evident, to a rational mind, that the Squire must die.  But wishing to be humane as well as rational, I desired his death to be temporary.