Some Policemen and a Moral

The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping
off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at
a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of
knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something
about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that
reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy.
They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it,
what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war,
name of favourite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree;
which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it.
The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this.
After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of
an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and,
I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes,
the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I
professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS
(this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common
to all tyrants), that I lived in a particular place as stated,
and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire,
who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.

In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary
at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader
of my work. And when that was said, everything was settled.
They acquitted me and let me pass.

"But," I said, "what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue
of that Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like
knight-errants. You, the higher humanitarians, are not deceived
by the seeming stillness of the green things, a stillness like
the stillness of the cataract, a headlong and crashing silence.
You know that a tree is but a creature tied to the ground by one leg.
You will not let assassins with their Swedish daggers shed the green
blood of such a being. But if so, why am I not in custody;
where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of your persons,
my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have just
convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist,
that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank
of Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether
I have been guilty of cruelty to