The truth would seem to be that at bottom Lobato is not a teller of stories but a critic of men. His vein is distinctly satiric, ironic; he has the gift of the caricaturist, and that is why so often his tales run either into sentimentality or into the macabrous. When he tells a tale of horror, it is not the uncannily graduated art of a Poe, but rather the thing itself that is horrible. His innate didactic tendency reveals itself not only in his frankly didactic labours, but in his habit of prefixing to his tales a philosophical, commentative prelude. Because he is a well-read, cosmopolitan person, his tales and comments often possess that worldly significance which no amount of regional outlook can wholly obscure; but because he is so intent upon sounding the national note he spoils much of his writing by stepping onto the pages in his own person. At his best he suggests the arrival in Brazilian literature of a fresh, spontaneous, creative power. Tales like _A Modern Torture_ (in which a rural dabbler in politics, weary of his postal delivery “job,” turns traitor to the old party and helps elect the new, only to be “rewarded” with the same old “job”) are rare in any tongue and would not be out of place in a collection by Chekhov or Twain. Here is humour served by--and not in the service of--nation, nature and man. Similarly _Choo-Pan!_ with its humorous opening and gradual progress to the grim close, shows what can be done when a writer becomes the master and not the slave of indigenous legend. A comparison of this tale with a similar one, _The Tree That Kills_, may bring out the author’s weakness and his strength. In the first, under peculiar circumstances, a man meets his death through a tree that, according to native belief, avenges the hewing down of its fellow. In the second, the _Tree That Kills_ is explained as a sort of preface, then follows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like the _Tree That Kills_, eats his way into the love of a childless pair, only first to betray the husband and then, after wearying of the woman, to attempt her life as well. The first story, besides being well told, is made to appear intimately Brazilian; the death of the man, who is a sot and has so bungled his work that the structure was bound to topple over, is natural, and actual belief in the legend is unnecessary; it colours the tale and lends atmosphere. _The Tree That Kills_, on the other hand, is merely another tale of the domestic triangle, no more Brazilian than anything else, with a twist of retribution at the end that must have appealed to the preacher hidden in Lobato; the analogy of the foster-son to the tree is not an integral part of the tale; the story, in fact, is added to the explanation of the tree parasite and is itself parasitical.