It seemed to him that, had it been midnight instead of this blank, even daylight, had his unearthly-looking visitant acted in more unearthly fashion, the circumstances would have had less weird force to impress his mind.
We can, after all, only form conjectures regarding inexplicable incidents from the successive impressions that have been made upon us.
This man was not at all given to love of romance or superstition, yet the easy explanation that some man, for purpose of trick or crime, had hidden in the box, did not seem to him to fit the circumstances.

He could not make himself believe that the eyes he had seen belonged to a living man; on the other hand, he found it impossible to conceive of a tea-drinking ghost.
About a quarter of a mile away there was a long grove of birch trees, the projecting spur of a second growth of forest that covered the distant rising ground.

Towards this Trenholme strode, for it was the only covert near in which a human being could travel unseen.

It was more by the impulse of energy, however, than by reasonable hope that he came there, for by the time he had reached the edge of the trees, it was beginning to grow dark, even in the open plain.
No one who has not seen birch trees in their undisturbed native haunts can know how purely white, unmarred by stain or tear, their trunks can be.

Trenholme looked in among them.