in your own mind,
and that the actual external world had little to do with them. Old
Coppelius may have been repulsive enough, but his hatred of children
was what really caused the abhorrence of your children towards him.

In your childish mind the frightful sandman in the nurse's tale was
naturally associated with old Coppelius, who, even if you had not
believed in the sandman, would still have been a spectral monster,
especially dangerous to children. The awful nightly occupation with
your father, was no more than this, that both secretly made alchemical
experiments, and with these your mother was constantly dissatisfied,
since besides a great deal of money being uselessly wasted, your
father's mind being filled with a fallacious desire after higher wisdom
was alienated from his family--as they say, is always the case with
such experimentalists. Your father no doubt, by some act of
carelessness, occasioned his own death, of which Coppelius was
completely guiltless. Would you believe it, that I yesterday asked our
neighbour, the clever apothecary, whether such a sudden and fatal
explosion was possible in such chemical experiments? "Certainly," he
replied, and in his way told me at great length and very
circumstantially how such an event might take place, uttering a number
of strange-sounding names, which I am unable to recollect. Now, I know
you will be angry with your Clara; you will say that her cold
disposition is impenetrable to every ray of the mysterious, which often
embraces man with invisible arms, that she only sees the varigated
surface of the world, and has the delight of a silly child, at some
gold-glittering fruit, which contains within it a deadly poison.

Ah! my dear Nathaniel! Do you not then believe that even in free,
cheerful, careless minds, here may dwell the suspicion of some dread
power, which endeavours to destroy us in our own selves? Forgive me,
if I, a silly girl, presume in any manner to indicate, what I really
think of such an internal struggle; I shall not find out the right
words after all, and you will laugh at me, not because my thoughts are
foolish, but because I set about so clumsily to express them.

If there is a dark power, which with such enmity and treachery lays a
thread within us, by which it holds us fast, and draws us along a path
of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if,
I say, there is such a power, it must form itself within us, or fro