re hurriedly put away. At the time
I thought it a silly kind of affectation. But I perceive now that he
had had a real shock the first time he had seen the mask; and though he
was then a big schoolboy, the terror was indelible. Who can say of what
old inheritance of fear that horror of the great ape-like countenance
was the sign? He had no associations of fear with apes, but it must
have been, I think, some dim old primeval terror, dating from some
ancestral encounter with a forest monster. In no other way can I
explain it.

Again, as a child, I was once sitting at dinner with my parents,
reading an old bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the pictures, and
waiting for dessert. I turned a page, and saw a picture of a Saint,
lying on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge and cloudy fiend
with vast bat-like wings bending over him, preparing to clutch him, but
deterred by the sacred emblem. That was a really terrible shock. I
turned the page hastily, and said nothing, though it deprived me of
speech and appetite. My father noticed my distress, and asked if I felt
unwell, but I said "No." I got through dessert somehow; but then I had
to say good-night, go out into the dimly-lit hall, slip the volume back
into the bookcase, and get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feeling
the air full of wings and clutching hands. That was too bad ever to be
spoken of; and as I did not remember which volume it was, I was never
able to look at the set of magazines again for fear of encountering it;
and strange to say some years afterwards, when I was an Eton boy, I
looked curiously for the picture, and again experienced the same
overwhelming horror.

My youngest brother, too, an imaginative child, could never be
persuaded by any bribes or entreaties to go into a dark room to fetch
anything out. Nothing would induce him. I remember that he was
catechised at the tea-table as to what he expected to find, to which he
replied at once, with a horror-stricken look and a long stammer,
"B--b--b--bloodstained corpses!"

It seems fantastic and ridiculous enough to older people, but the
horror of the dark and of the unknown which some children have is not a
thing to be laughed at, nor should it be unsympathetically combated.
One must remember that experience has not taught a child scepticism; he
thinks that anything in the world may happen; and all the monsters of
nursery tales, goblins, witches, evil fairies, dragons, which a child
in dayli