" They left the little city behind them and swung out into the open country. Immediately the trees resumed their solemn march on either side, very much -- it seemed to Blackwood -- as if they were files of soldiers on perpetual guard. He was ardently sick of trees, in spite of an early-morning notion that dwellers in the city were oafs and half-wits. Trees hemmed one in. They weighed mysteriously on the senses. He hoped that he would never see another adjectival tree. The poet who could sing of trees was full of bats and mice and fleas. Riley Blackwood, jiggling along a country road in northern Wisconsin, would have given up a dollar and a half for just one glimpse of a sputtering white electric sign in Clark Street. "

― Vincent Starrett , The Great Hotel Murder