The Equinox (Volume I, Number VIII)

THE EQUINOX murdered tree were neither history nor tragedy to him; the comic and the pastoral were equally sealed books, for the forest has neither satyrs nor shepherds. He had no sport, since in his boyhood his father had thrashed him for throwing his axe at a stag; and no society, for the nearest forester thought him a boor. He chopped to live, and lived to chop. It was the philosopher of the Rue de Chevreuse who cast the grain of sand into the wheels of this approximation to the solution of the problem of perpetual motion. The philosopher was really a painter, but so bad a painter that he was only known as a theorist in the cafe which supplied his creme de menthe. There he would hold forth interininably on God and man. Blessed with such means as a mediocre father's devotion to cutlery and an only son had supplied, it was his habit on occasion to descend into the country. Picture him, if you please, as very short and moderately fat, middle-aged at thirty- t\\‘o, clad in a bourgeois suit and an artist's tie, a red handker— chief under a black felt hat upon a bushy head garnished with a little beard and moustache, perspiring in a sandy and interminable bridle-path leading from the Long Rocher to nowhere in particular. These walks he would undertake (a) for his health, (b) to absorb the beauties of nature—as he would often demonstrate. Yet the greatest of philosophers are not always logical, and he would have been compelled to discover other reasons for his choice of company. This consisted of a lady whose age was rendered only more uncertain by her efforts to nail conjecture to the number 25. Her hair paled visibly from 82