led with alien images.

THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS

It is generally understood in the family that the nurse who menaces a
child, whether with the supernatural or with simple sweeps, lions, or
tigers--goes. The rule is a right one, for the appeal to fear may
possibly hurt a child; nevertheless, it oftener fails to hurt him. If he
is prone to fears, he will be helpless under their grasp, without the
help of human tales. The night will threaten him, the shadow will
pursue, the dream will catch him; terror itself have him by the heart.
And terror, having made his pulses leap, knows how to use any thought,
any shape, any image, to account to the child's mind for the flight and
tempest of his blood. "The child shall not be frightened," decrees
ineffectual love; but though no man make him afraid, he is frightened.
Fear knows him well and finds him alone.

Such a child is hardly at the mercy of any human rashness and impatience;
nor is the child whose pulses go steadily, and whose brows are fresh and
cool, at their mercy. This is one of the points upon which a healthy
child resembles the Japanese. Whatever that extreme Oriental may be in
war and diplomacy, whatever he may be at London University, or whatever
his plans of Empire, in relation to the unseen world he is a child at
play. He hides himself, he hides his eyes and pretends to believe that
he is hiding, he runs from the supernatural and laughs for the fun of
running.

So did a child, threatened for his unruliness with the revelation of the
man with two heads. The nurse must have had recourse to this man under
acute provocation. The boy, who had profited well by every one of his
four long years, and was radiant with the light and colour of health,
refused to be left to compose himself to sleep. That act is an adult
act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life,
when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of setting
forth. But the child is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught,
surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to sleep, than he takes a
"constitutional" with his hoop and hoopstick. The child amuses himself
up to the last of his waking moments. Happily, in the search for
amusement, he is apt to learn some habit or to cherish some toy, either
of which may betray him and deliver him up to sleep, the enemy. What
wonder, then, if a child who knows that everyone in the world desires his
peace and pleasure, shou